Re: Underline element.

On Dec 29, 2007, at 4:19 AM, Ben Boyle wrote:

>
> On Dec 29, 2007 9:08 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>> Personally I think <u> should remain conforming, if only to give HTML
>> editing UIs something obvious to insert when the the [U] button is
>> pressed. At the same time, I agree that underlining non-hyperlink  
>> text
>> in an HTML document is usually a poor practice.
>
> I agree, and add that poor practice doesn't mean there aren't valid
> uses (some of which have been given throughout this thread). I'm not
> so sure about the U buttons in authoring tools, but we should leave
> that for ATAG to sort out if needed.

I don't think the developers of tools like GMail, WordPress or  
LiveJournal, or developers of rich text editing libraries like TinyMCE  
or FCKEditor, pay much attention to ATAG. Plus ATAG doesn't seem to  
have anything to say about what kind of markup [B], [I] or [U] buttons  
or similar things should generate. Still, my argument is pretty weak  
in that not every formatting feature is common enough (or has standard  
enough typographical conventions around it) deserves a conforming tag.

The main difference between <u> on the one hand and <b> and <i> on the  
other, as far as I can tell, is that the latter two are much more  
commonly used, and their associated default formatting has many  
meaningful uses in standard typography.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Saturday, 29 December 2007 14:38:59 UTC