- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 22:16:43 +0300
On Aug 28, 2005, at 11:02, Lachlan Hunt wrote: > Although some editors do also provide some semantic options, they're > usually limited in their abilities. Some have some semantic block > level elements like headings, paragraphs, lists and maybe blockquote. > However, few have semantic elements like abbr, cite, code, dfn, kbd, > samp, var, q and strong/em (some, like contentEditable, mistakenly use > bold and italic options for those). I often have to jump through > hoops just to get <code> in my markup while using dreamweaver, by > using the buttons for <b> and/or <i> and then running search and > replace to fix up the markup. Could the user interface difficulties with this semantic inline elements stem at least partly from problems with the semantic inline elements themselves? Consider <cite> for example. What's it really good for? Why should an author bother to use <cite> instead of <i>? Once you have learned to press command-i (or ctrl-i), why should you have to learn to do something else when all you really want to get done is to italicize titles of works? I think making the case for <cite> fails the explaining to mother test. Chances are that there is something wrong with <cite> if I don't know how to explain to my mother why she should use it instead of the semantically empty italics. I cannot come up with any tangible advantages. And I have been able to make the case for paragraphs and headings. When mother was putting literature lists (eg. http://www.helsinki.fi/~rkosken/kirjallisuus/pukuhistoria.html ) on the Web, she asked something about the technicalities so I to look. My immediate thought was that there are titles of works and they should be marked up using <cite>. However, when I thought how I should make the point, I couldn't come up with any good explanation why the effort should be expanded. The scenario that perhaps in the future there will be a need to style the titles of works in a different way (for example bold strike-through fuchsia) seemed ludicrous. Also, the point about pieces of software doing something cool with the data did not seem like a truthful explanation, because <cite> has been around for a long time and still there are no reports of a killer app emerging around it. So I did not recommend <cite>. Aside: Now that I looked at the source of the literature list, I noticed that some titles of works were marked up as <em>. my hypothesis is that after an upgrade Dreamweaver has started using <em> when pressing command-i. Sigh. See http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2004/05/02/b-and-i Having been involved in two ambitious government-funded metadata projects, I have observed that people who get drawn into the metadata mindset tend to get carried away thinking what they can express in a supposedly machine-readable way and forget if anyone is really interested in processing what they think they can express and if such processing requires an AI-complete system (or whether real users want to be bothered with all the data entry) and they happily forget focusing on full text search in the process. Semantic markup is metadata of sorts, and it seems to me that proponents of semantic markup often forget practical motivations of semantic markup and go into the astronaut mode trying to come up with things they can express forgetting to think whether there is demand for what they plan on expressing in the receiving end and whether the granularity of their expression serves a useful purpose. I thought http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2005Aug/0054.html was a joke but the followups seem to go on seriously! See also http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/12/29/million_dollar_markup P.S. Using <cite> and <code> is relatively easy with OOo Writer/Web but not as easy as pressing command-i. I have used <cite> myself when writing using OOo Writer/Web, but I admit I should consider the motivation rather cargo cultish. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Tuesday, 30 August 2005 12:16:43 UTC