Re: a quote is a quote is a quote [was Re: Cleaning House]

>
> thank you for your reasoned and rapid response...  i apologize for 
> overlooking your contribution to the thread, but as i think we can 
> all agree, it takes a lot of time and effort to plow through all 
> the mail one receives daily from public-html
>   
Oy, you're not kidding.  I'm just happy to stay on top of the general 
direction of the discussion, much less try to read everything...

> BLOCKQUOTE is already "half" deprecated, anyway:
The way I read that is that the _misuse_ of BLOCKQUOTE (as a way to 
indent text without learning CSS) is deprecated. As it should be.  But 
the part of the spec that says "/as some authors have used BLOCKQUOTE 
merely as a mechanism to indent text/

//

> why not use the opportunity to deprecate BLOCKQUOTE altogether?
Because we're supposed to be evolving the Web-as-it-is.  There are a 
huge number of documents out there using BLOCKQUOTE today, many if not 
most of which use it correctly (to indicate quoted text) rather than 
incorrectly (to hack together indented text).  I have certainly seen it 
used "properly" more often than misused in the last few years in the 
sites I visit; and most modern blog packages and CMSes use BLOCKQUOTE 
correctly by default. Removing BLOCKQUOTE in favor of a mutated Q or 
some new element would break those documents and applications.  That's 
not a step I would want to see this WG take unless there were a Really 
Important Reason to do so, which doesn't seem to be the case, at least 
to me...
>  i am interested in your reaction to the other 
> presentational elements i listed:
>
>   * B (bold)
>   * BIG
>   * I (italics)
>   * SMALL
>   * SUB (subscript)
>   * SUP (superscript)
>   * TT
>   
BIG, SMALL, and TT strike me as obvious candidates for deprecation; my 
hunch is they're rarely used, and they have strictly presentational 
value, without any semantic meaning I can see.  I'm agnostic on B and I; 
if they're just going to be replaced by STRONG and EM, we might as well 
use B and I and save ourselves the trouble. SUB and SUP aren't 
semantically meaningful, but they are probably more widely used than the 
first three I listed, so I'd want to tread more carefully with them.

Hope this is helpful!

-- Jason Lefkowitz

-- 
Jason A. Lefkowitz
web: http://www.jasonlefkowitz.net
email: jason@jasonlefkowitz.net

"A statesman... is a dead politician.
Lord knows, we need more statesmen." -- Bloom County