- From: Matthew Szudzik <mszudzik@andrew.cmu.edu>
- Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:11:21 +0000
- To: public-html-comments@w3.org
In the current (12 December 2007) draft of the HTML 5 specification, the <tt> tag is absent. I personally use the <tt> tag in my work, and I would like to persuade individuals to re-introduce <tt> back into the specification. In documents that describe computer languages, it is important to discuss the typographic conventions used to describe those languages. For example, here is one such discussion of typographic conventions http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/overall/thefor.html which contains the following HTML code snippet <dt><tt>Teletype</tt> <dd> (constant width) is used for sample code fragments and examples. Note that the content of the document makes explicit reference to a style of presentation. It is not possible to separate presentation from content. If the <tt> tag were replaced with a <code> tag, and if a style sheet were to render the content of <code> tags in Helvetica, for example, then the meaning of this content would be lost. So, <tt> is the proper semantic tag in this context, because the author is discussing teletype text. The <tt> tag is also of practical use in documents that describe computer interfaces. For example, consider the following computer operating system installation instructions http://openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html which contain the following HTML code snippet <li>Erase the character you typed to stop the boot, type<br> <tt><b>boot /4.2/i386/bsd.rd</b></tt><br> then press <i>Enter</i>. The important point is that these instructions should simultaneously be readable from a full-featured, graphic web browser such as Firefox, and from a legacy, text-only web browser such as Lynx, because an individual may need to refer to the instructions using a terminal interface, before the graphic user interface has been fully installed on a machine. Now, text-only browsers like Lynx ignore style sheets, so the document must be marked-up with presentational elements such as <b> (which, for example, renders in blue using Lynx on my machine's terminal interface), instead of semantic elements like <kbd>, which are ignored. I note that presentational elements such as <b> and <i> are included in the HTML 5 specification, and facilitate the use of HTML in this practical circumstance. Even though the <tt> tag is ignored by the text-only browser, the same document must be readable from a graphic web browser. If <code> were to be used instead of <tt> in the snippet above, then the HTML becomes a seemingly inconsistent mix of presentational and semantic markup. For the sake of consistency, the <tt> tag is preferred.
Received on Thursday, 20 December 2007 03:41:46 UTC