Re: Cleaning House

On May 3, 2007, at 18:12, John Foliot - WATS.ca wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> It would be really nice if the advocates of semantic markup based
>> their advocacy on realistic use cases instead of an axiomatic belief
>> that more semantics are good and all presentational features are bad.
>
> It boils down to this:  If you want to Bold some text, or italicize  
> it, or
> underline it, you are doing so *for a reason*... I don't care  
> really what
> the reason is,

More to the point, authors don't care to make it explicit what the  
reason is even though there is a reason.

> But if you can't *SEE* the bold, italic or underlined text, how do you
> convey that same cue/clue to the end consumer?  For the sighted user,
> presentational features are not bad, but for the non-sighted, pray  
> tell, how
> will you convey that same nuance?

By making the default UA presentation of <i> match the default  
presentation of <em> and making the default presentation of <b> match  
the default UA presentation of <strong>. (And by making these  
different from normal paragraph text.)

> So I will turn the tables - give me a good, realistic use-case where
> presenting nuanced information to some users, while excluding  
> others, is
> "good".

That's not what I'm suggesting. OTOH, on the face of it, it seems to  
be what the <span style=''> advocates are suggesting.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/