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- Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:49:28 +0000
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http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10862 --- Comment #4 from Shelley Powers <shelleyp@burningbird.net> 2010-09-30 16:49:28 UTC --- Another demonstration of the inconsistency of decisions is the reason decision the HTML5 editor made about the U element: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10838 Ian Hickson wrote: "The concrete badness is that if we have an element that is purely for presentational purposes, people will be locked into that rendering for all the purposes for which they have used it. This contrasts with semantic markup, where you can restyle a category of content using a style sheet. For example, you can restyle all the content that is intended to be in a different voice to be in a different font, rather than just italics. Or you can style keywords in a different colour as well as being bold. In general there is also the value of educating authors about using the right semantic tools — as we push people away from <font> and <u>, they get closer to using the much more semantic elements like <cite> and <aside>. This further increases the authoring benefits for those authors and their readers, especially those readers using non-visual UAs, whose tools can then apply more appropriate rendering than just guessing at how to express (in this case) underlines in their medium. When we added <b>, <i>, <small>, and, most recently, <s>, it was not that we were adding presentational elements and that we were justifying it by doublethinking a semantic meaning for them. HTML really does define these elements now in semantic terms; that they have existing presentations is a backwards-compatibility boon; that the elements are often already used for the purposes for which we defined them makes them easier to teach. But that doesn't make them any less semantic. These definitions are sometimes referred to disparagingly as "semantic fig leafs", but I think that viewing them that way misses the point of why these elements exist in the language. They each have real use cases." So we have arbitrarily decided that u is not semantic, but s is, though the same misuse of both elements occurred in the past, and will continue in the future. There is no rhyme or reason, or logic, to any of this. I get the impression that a coin was tossed when deciding about each: heads, we keep s; tails, we dump u. There is no underlying architectural design to these decisions. No overall plan. The editor arrived at them haphazardly--dumping in, and ripping out elements and attributes based seemingly more on a whim, than a solid technical foundation. -- Configure bugmail: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the QA contact for the bug.
Received on Thursday, 30 September 2010 16:49:30 UTC