Re: Cleaning House

At 12:04 PM 5/6/2007 +0200, Tina Holmboe wrote:
>On Sat, May 05, 2007 at 08:41:23PM -0400, Murray Maloney wrote:
>
> > From the June 1993 Internet Draft for HTML:
> > http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt
> >
> > STRONG        Stronger emphasis, typically bold.
> > B               Boldface, where available, otherwise alternative mapping
> > allowed.
> > EM              Emphasis, typically italic.
> > I               Italic font (or slanted if italic unavailable).
>
>   Yes. Even that text prove my point.

If you are only intent on being RIGHT, then I encourage you to feel righteous.
Go for it. Don't bother to try to see beyond your own point of view.
That might be too much like considering another point of view.

Please note that the description of B above is ambiguous about using bold.

If you use your own mind for a moment, you will see that none of the 
descriptions
above are emphatic about which font to use. It is only a hint. Browsers 
could use
green for <em> but they don't.

> > elements. But consider <i class="ship">.
>
>   Meaning nothing. Do you mean a ship name? Or is it an abbreviate
>   name for a shipping label? Or perhaps even a status saying whether
>   something is about to ship?

Hmmm. Not so hasty. You can't actually say that it has no meaning.
The reason is that you have not examined the profile that is associated
with that HTML document -- because I didn't provide a pointer.

The thing is, my profile says that when class="ship" the meaning is the
name of a ship, which happens to formatted in italic typeface by convention
when it is available.

> > In "HTML as she are spoke," <i> and <em> are synonyms for most intents and
> > purposes.
>
>   No. In HTML *in the wild* the I-element is used for italics, without
>   thought or reason.

There is evidence of <i> being used with thought and reason.
There is no evidence of <em> being used with greater thought and reason.

>   If I cannot explain to you, so that you understand, the difference
>   between "emphasized term" and "italics text", then that is no longer my
>   failure to communicate.

Italic text is emphasized.
Emphasized terms are presented in italics.
<i> is used to indicate a fallback to italics.
<em> is used to indicate an emphasized term.

What is the difference between <i>term</i> and <em>term</em>?


> > Why not?
> >
> > I have been layering semantics onto the CLASS attribute and REL/REV since
> > 1993.
>
>   With support from which standard?

Let's see, we used REL/REV in 1993 based on HTML 1.0.

We used CLASS since it was introduced in 1996, I think.
That is when SoftQuad developed HoTMetaL Intranet Publisher.

Regards,

Murray

Received on Sunday, 6 May 2007 16:20:38 UTC