Re: Proposing <indent> vs. <blockquote>

Mike Schinkel schrieb:
>> http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/ProposedDesignPrinciples
>> "markup that expresses semantics is usually preferred to purely 
>> presentational markup" -- So you can't deprecate a semantic element in 
>> favor of a presentational one.
> I was not asking to deprecate <blockquote>. It still have significant 
> value.  But it is very often misused simple to gain an indent which is 
> what I was proposing.

Well, you wrote "vs. <blockquote>", and it has been requested to 
deprecate <blockquote> for reasons similar to yours.

>> "HTML Strikes a balance between semantic expressiveness and practical 
>> usefulness." -- Explicitly removing semantics can't be considered as a 
>> balance. (I neither think <indent> would be useful.)
> I wasn't proposing removing semantics. I was proposing adding an element 
> with reduced semantics that could be used when another would often be 
> misused.

The thing is, people think presentational even if the want semantics. If 
there's <indent>, people will use that to indent text that they want to 
quote. Otherwise, we could also reanimate <font>.

>>> Did I say that?  (Asked another way, since when do *browsers* 
>>> generally recognize semantics in markup?)
>> So you expect accessible browser X to recognize <indent class="quote"> 
>> as a quote?
> I didn't say that either. Why do you keep trying to attribute to me 
> statements I did not make?

I expected that you wanted to make that statement, since we need 
accessible browsers to recognize semantics.

>> I can't tell you the year, but certain browsers have to do that in 
>> order to present content to disabled users. 
> Have to do what?

"recognize semantics in markup".

>> It can also be important for software apart from browsers, like search 
>> engines.
> Important how?

Search engines have to weight content.

--dao

Received on Thursday, 12 April 2007 09:51:13 UTC