Re: Cleaning House

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> T.V Raman, one of the few people in this group who uses an aural 
> presentation full-time, has said that he likes the <b> and <i> elements. 
> I'll let his explanation speak for itself: 
> <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007JanMar/0668.html>.

"it matters little at
the end of the day if the emphasized text  came through encoded
as <em> or <i> once you have defined the same aural rule for both
elements."

that's a "duh!" kind of comment, sorry. If I tell my user agent to treat 
both X and Y the same, it doesn't make a difference to me whether you've 
used X or Y. No kidding! This isn't even circular logic, this is just 
circular full stop.

"I dont believe visual web browsers have made this distinction
anyway, in which case there is no real distinction."

Which doesn't mean there isn't a distinction. Sighted users of visual 
web browsers can, if they so wish, set their own styles to override the 
non-distinct presentation. New user agents can implement a visual 
differentiation. Tools can be built that can extract further meaning 
from the differentiation.

Saying that, because current visual implementations don't distinguish, 
it doesn't matter, is pretty much precluding any possible distinction in 
the future by just wrongly ratifying that there is no distinction.

Also worth noting that Raman's opinion/preference is just that - a 
single user's opinion and preference. It is worth taking that into 
consideration.

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 18:10:31 UTC