- From: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:29:01 +1000
- To: Karl Dubost <karl@w3.org>
- CC: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
Karl Dubost wrote: > Indeed a semantics extractor looking at the version of HTML > > <p>Life is <small>tough</small>.</p> > > * HTML 4.01 > SMALL: Renders text in a "small" font. > * HTML 5.01 > The small element represents small print (part of a document often > describing legal restrictions, such as copyrights or other > disadvantages), or other side comments. That's a problem with HTML4. It left the semantics almost completely undefined and so any use case for small text was effectively allowed. HTML5 somewhat restricts the use cases to a smaller subset, but the question is whether or not that is useful in practice? > Then I'm an implementer of a semantics extractor. What are my > implementation strategies? That isn't a real use case, since it depends entirely on the purpose of extracting that information, which you have not specified. Extracting arbitrary information for no known purpose is not useful. What are you trying to achieve by extracting the content of small elements? What information are you looking for? Why is that information useful? Are there any existing tools that attempt to extract that type of information? As I said before, whether or not <small> is currently used for legal or copyright info in practice is questionable, but it's also questionable whether having specific markup for legal information is at all useful. So I don't believe the question about whether or not to retain small has anything to do with it's semantic compatibility, but whether or not it fulfils a useful purpose both in theory and in practice. -- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/
Received on Wednesday, 18 July 2007 04:29:11 UTC