- From: Ca Phun Ung <caphun@yelotofu.com>
- Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2008 03:11:43 +0800
- To: HTMLWG <public-html@w3.org>
The question of whether <u> should be dropped begs a bigger question of whether <b>, <i> and other presentational markup should go as well. I see no place for these other than backwards compatibility. Leaving these elements in the spec (note: the <u> element is not part of the spec and I'm glad it's gone) causes more confusion than clarity and has a negative effect on semantics. We will continue to see <b> and <i> wrongly used for <strong> and <em> respectively or vis-versa well into HTML5. The point Oliver Gendrin made with regards to Chinese underlining names is a valid point that should not be overlooked. Catering for an international audience should be a high priority of HTML5 as East meets West. PHP6 is adapting to this trend by being UTF-8 compliant, hence in the not so distant future we'd see PHP code written in Chinese or a non-English language! I'm not suggesting we do the same with HTML5 but should we not consider the implications of these presentational elements when put into the context of another language? Take the <i> and Ship name example. If a ship name is always italicized in English then it should be underlined in Chinese. So if an English document is translated containing some italicized ship names, <i> will not make sense when translated into Chinese. CSS could be used to change the look of all <i> elements so they are underlined but we cannot be certain that only ship names are wrapped in <i>, and I'm sure in English we certainly don't wrap all names with <i>. In my view, the <b> and <i> elements are an attempt to allow general purpose elements in order to cover those areas of semantics we're not that bothered with, such as <name> and <term>. I understand we cannot create elements for each and every semantic meaning under the Sun but we could at least remove those elements that add no value to HTML, namely <b>, <i> and <u>. Richard Ishida, W3C Internationalisation Lead, did a good presentation on internationalisation and talks a bit about some issues with the <i> element: http://webstandardsgroup.org/audio/mp3/melbourne-060209-1.mp3 I hope I don't offend anyone or stir up strife with this post but I just wanted to add my two cents to this thread.
Received on Friday, 4 January 2008 15:00:38 UTC