- From: Philip & Le Khanh <Philip-and-LeKhanh@Royal-Tunbridge-Wells.Org>
- Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 21:35:26 +0100
- To: www-html@w3.org, public-html@w3.org
Jukka K. Korpela wrote: > > On Thu, 3 May 2007, Patrick H. Lauke wrote: > >> So how about, right here right now, moving the contentious <b>, <i>, >> <sub>, <sup> and <small> (did I miss any others?) under the >> "Presentational markup" section > > I think I've seen this before... Those elements have been discussed > many, many times on different forums. Calling all of them > indiscriminately "presentational" is gross oversimplification. Surely > the difference between 3<sup>2</sup> and 32 is not just in visual > rendering; it's the difference between 9 and 32. > > Unfortunately, the discussions seldom go past the point of an incomplete > statement of the problem. If such issues where presentation and meaning > are intimately coupled cannot be analyzed and solved properly, it is > best to allow common presentational markup as currently allowed in HTML, > and perhaps add a little. Taking it away without adding fairly complex > semantic markup for all the relevant cases would be a disservice. I usually agree with Jukka, and I certainly agree that <sub>/<sup> transcend the content/form boundary (and would therefore have no objections to their retention in HTML 5). However, I do not believe that even were they to be removed, we would have to "[add] fairly complex semantic markup for all the relevant cases" : rather, I believe we should provide the functionality to allow an author to add his/her own preferred semantic markup, since the one things on which I am confident we /all/ agree is that a finite set of elements can never carry all the possible semantic nuances that an author might wish to convey. Philip Taylor
Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 20:35:32 UTC