Re: Cleaning House

Dear Tina (and everyone else who doesn't quite get this...),

The semantics* of <i> is emphasise with italic typeface.
The semantics* of <em> is emphasise, probably with italics

Please note that the semantics* of <i> and <em> are purposely loose
so that user agents can choose to employ whatever emphasis is available
to the UA on that platform. The practical effect is that in some UAs, both
<i> and <em> are presented without any emphasis at all.

The semantics of <p> are that of a paragraph. There are stylistic implications
which may include setting the paragraph apart from other blocks of text
with pre- and post-space, indenting the margins, text justification, and
sometimes a large indent in the first line of the paragraph. More sophisticated
stylistic effects are less common but certainly employed.

The semantics of <div> are that of a structural container.

Additional semantics may be layered upon these elements by employing CLASS
attribute values. Such semantics may be interpreted by CSS or XSL stylesheets
or by GRDDL-aware agents.



At 09:30 PM 5/3/2007 +0200, Tina Holmboe wrote:

>On  3 May, T.V Raman wrote:
>
> > A)      <b> and <i> are perfect fine to retain
> >         --not so much because of legacy support, because in
> >         practice <em> is no more semantic than <i>.
>
>   I'll admit you lost me there. No HTML element is inherently semantic,
>   but a semantic interpretation is possible after the "semantic value"
>   has been defined in, for instance, prose.
>
>   <EM> has, as far as it has existed, been defined with a specific,
>   semantic, "value". <I> has not - and, consequently, it has been used
>   to create italic text. That was, after all, its purpose.
>
>   Would you say that P, in practice, is no more semantic than DIV, since
>   very few UAs actually do anything MORE with a P than they do with a
>   DIV?
>
>
>
> > B)      I believe presentational markup is evil.
>
>   We certainly agree there.
>
>
>--
>  -     Tina Holmboe                    Greytower Technologies (UK) Ltd.
>    tina@greytower.co.uk                  http://www.greytower.co.uk
>      +46 708 557 905

Received on Saturday, 5 May 2007 13:11:50 UTC