- From: Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>
- Date: Tue, 21 May 2013 20:20:59 +0200
- To: Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>
- Cc: "Patrick H. Lauke" <redux@splintered.co.uk>, HTMLWG WG <public-html@w3.org>
Steve Faulkner, Tue, 21 May 2013 14:26:17 +0100: > fair enough, so how about the following > > "The small element represents de-emphasised content" De-emphasize can be interpreted as 'remove emphasize'. Would rather support the proposal about 'de-promote/demote': "The small element represents content that is de-promoted". Some words of justification: * A heading is more prominent than the article it’s a heading for. But a heading isn’t, because of its prominence, ’emphasized’. * Text outside <small> does no need to be emphasized, even if it is more prominent: <p>A word. <small>So small.</small></p>. * A heading part set in <small> would be less prominent than the rest of that heading - but still more prominent than body text. * Prominent content is what one would consider including in an abridged version or outline. Demoted content would be candidate for exclusion from a short version/outline. * Prominence is not affected by <strong> or <em> (but rather by things like heading level and order of occurrence). > On the topic of users who don't get the effect of smaller text: > > To my knowledge <small> is the same as <span> for screen reader users, so > in a sense they are advantaged as the visual de-emphasis is not apparent If HTML5 refines the definition, why couldn’t AT start to present <small> differently, to signal its lowered prominence? Perhaps screen readers could 'illustrate' <small> by reading its content faster, so that the user can’t so easily get the details of what the text without asking the screen reader software to read slower? For instance, imagine that, for a piece of software, the BSD license was placed inside the <small> element. In fact, I think video/audio adverts to a degree already do read ’small print’ (such as message about who approved a certain advert) that way. (However, a certain contextual evaluation of what <small> means, would probably be needed.) -- leif halvard silli
Received on Tuesday, 21 May 2013 18:21:28 UTC