Re: Cleaning House

At 10:54 AM 5/6/2007 +0100, Philip & Le Khanh wrote:



>Murray Maloney wrote:
>
>>I see no advantage to using <em> over <i>. That is largely because they 
>>both fall back to an italic typeface in most graphical browsers.
>
>How an element "falls back in most graphical browsers" is completely
>and utterly irrelevant to its semantics.  If the semantics of HTML
>were defined by how each element in it "falls back in most graphical
>browsers", then HTML would be 100% presentational.  Instead, the
>semantics are defined by the specification, and (in most cases)
>heuristically inferable from the name of the element (for
>educated native speakers of English).

Apparently you honestly believe that position.

So you are suggesting that the fact that a <table> has the appearance of 
what we
in the publishing field have come to know as a table has no bearing on the fact
that it is an encoding of a table.

And the fact that <img> presents an image likewise has no bearing.

And the fact that both are presentational hasn't seemed to be a big problem
for you unless I have missed some of your earlier comments.


>And when I asked
>
>>>Forgive my na\"\i vety, but which authority are
>>>you citing when you make this statement ?
>
>and you responded
>
>>The authority of someone with 30+ years as a technical writer,
>>20+ years in SGML, HTML, XML and so on, and an original
>>member of the earliest HTML Working Groups.
>
>I was actually seeking the /identity/ of the authority you
>were citing, rather than his/her experience in the field.
>As is invariably the case, it is necessary to understand
>the semantics of a question before being able to give a
>satisfactory answer.

I was citing myself as an authority. I will cite the W3C as the authority
who recognizes me as an expert by virtue of my invited expert status
in three W3C working groups (currently).

What is your authority to make the statements you have been making?

Murray

Received on Sunday, 6 May 2007 15:50:44 UTC