- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Sun, 6 May 2007 03:52:45 -0700
- To: Philip & Le Khanh <Philip-and-LeKhanh@Royal-Tunbridge-Wells.Org>
- Cc: www-html@w3.org, public-html@w3.org
On May 6, 2007, at 3:32 AM, Philip & Le Khanh wrote: > Maciej Stachowiak wrote: > > [...] > >> For HTML, there is no significant distinction in attested use >> between <em> and <i>. In practice they are used in the same kinds >> of contexts. > > There is no significant distinction in /uninformed/ attested use; > those who actually care about accessibility, on the other hand, > and who have bothered to read the guidelines, will use <em> where > emphasis is required, restricting their usage of <i> to purely > visual contexts where italicisation is required for presentational > reasons. > > As a standards organisation, the W3C defines what /should/ be done, > rather than merely rubber-stamping what is an actually an artifact > of uninformed usage, poor tools, and a lack of concern for > accessibility. Yes, that's exactly the difference between Prescriptivism and Descriptivism in linguistics. That's why contributors to this thread are often talking past each other. Some think it is the spec's definition of what you /should/ do, regardless of current practice, that defines semantics. Others say that actual use effectively defines the semantics. In this regard, a spec is like a dictionary. It's our chance to say what we think should be used. But consider what semantic markup is intended to be used for. Semantic markup is often promoted partly on the basis that it may allow for more kinds of machine reasoning about web content. But to apply any kind of useful machine reasoning to the web based on markup tags, you have to look at how the tags are actually used. After all, systems that do machine reasoning on human natural language generally work with a corpus, not a dictionary. And unfortunately, there is no machine-computable way to determine if a page was generated by informed or uninformed authors and tools. So it seems that advocates of semantic markup for machine reasoning purposes should favor descriptivist semantics, since it makes life easier if the spec better matches actual use. This would include things like making the definitions of popular tags better match their use, adopting commonly used class and rel values as predefined, etc. Semantic markup for accessibility reasons is a separate issue, but is probably also best addressed with a descriptivist approach. After all, users want to access the content that actually exists, not the content that /should/ be there. Regards, Maciej
Received on Sunday, 6 May 2007 10:52:54 UTC