- From: John Foliot - WATS.ca <foliot@wats.ca>
- Date: Thu, 3 May 2007 08:12:46 -0700
- To: "'Henri Sivonen'" <hsivonen@iki.fi>, "'Patrick H.Lauke'" <redux@splintered.co.uk>
- Cc: "'Boris Zbarsky'" <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>, <www-html@w3.org>, <public-html@w3.org>
James Graham wrote: > > FWIW I spent some time arguing this point of view on the WHATWG list. > I eventually came to the conclusion that I was wrong and that having > some presentational elements in the language to cover common > typographic conventions is a positive thing. Some of the reasons I > changed my view include: > > a) Having a *few* typographical elements for *common* typographical > conventions alleviates the abuse of semantic elements for non-semantic > purposes. For example blindly replacing <em> with <i> only serves to > make it harder for UAs to be sure that <em> is being used to indicate > emphasis. By encouraging authors who are not consciously specifying a > semantic rather than a presentation to use non-semantic elements > rather than mis-use semantic ones we can hope to prevent the dilution > of the semantics in "semantic" elements to the point that they are no > longer useful. Meanwhile... Henri Sivonen wrote: > It would be really nice if the advocates of semantic markup based > their advocacy on realistic use cases instead of an axiomatic belief > that more semantics are good and all presentational features are bad. It boils down to this: If you want to Bold some text, or italicize it, or underline it, you are doing so *for a reason*... I don't care really what the reason is, you are doing so in a visual way to indicate some connotation or other cue/clue to the end "reader", or consumer. But if you can't *SEE* the bold, italic or underlined text, how do you convey that same cue/clue to the end consumer? For the sighted user, presentational features are not bad, but for the non-sighted, pray tell, how will you convey that same nuance? So I will turn the tables - give me a good, realistic use-case where presenting nuanced information to some users, while excluding others, is "good". Sheesh... JF
Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 15:27:49 UTC