Re: Proposing <indent> vs. <blockquote>

Dao Gottwald wrote:
> 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.
I didn't intend to imply a deprecation. Sorry if I inadvertently gave 
that impression.
>>> "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>.
Good point, but probably the lesser of two evils.  OTOH, we could add an 
attribute such as @rel or @type to <indent>.
>> Otherwise, we could also reanimate <font>.
Actually, that's apples and oranges as <font> is not a block level 
element and by nature isn't something that people would use to apply CSS 
to.  For <indent> authors could define CSS to apply consistently across 
a document. You might think I'm being inconsistent by suggesting this, 
but I'm actually thinking that the person contributing posts or comments 
to a blog would be different from the person designing the theme, for 
example.
>>>> 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'm lost as to what you were trying to get across.  Are you discussing 
things like screen readers?
>>> It can also be important for software apart from browsers, like 
>>> search engines. 
>> Important how? 
> Search engines have to weight content.
One of my arguments for <indent> is that search engines currently cannot 
depend on <blockquote> because it is so often misused.  With <indent> 
there would be no semantics, which is better IMO than incorrect 
semantics. And semantics could be added specific attributes, like @rel 
or @type, or with @class and Microformats if Microformats succeed.

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org
http://atlanta-web.org - http://t.oolicio.us

Received on Saturday, 14 April 2007 05:57:27 UTC