- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Sat, 7 May 2005 21:50:11 +0300
On Apr 16, 2005, at 17:53, Ian Hickson wrote: > On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Lachlan Hunt wrote: >>> >>> Actually, <i> in HTML5 is currently defined as having specific >>> semantics: >>> >>> http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-i >> >> So does "i" now stand for "instance", instead of "italics"? > > At least until someone argues otherwise. :-) Everybody knows it originally stands for "italic". Who would you fool by claiming it stood for something else? For browsers, and the element name is just a string. They don't care of English words. The default rendering will have to be italics anyway due to ample legacy content. No matter what to write in the spec, for all practical purposes <i> will mean "italic". I think acknowledging this would be in line with the descriptive approach the WHAT WG specs tend to take when it comes to features that have been already interoperably implemented. What's the pseudo-semantic trickery good for? Will hard-line anti-presentationalists who spread false propaganda about <i> being deprecated suddenly embrace <i> if WHAT WG claims it stands for a different English word? >> In that case, would you want to differentiate between ordinary titles >> and real citations? Or is that something that the class attribute >> could >> handle, if needed? > > I don't know. What do people think? I'd define <cite> meaning a title of work (not a person and not limited to quoted works). -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Saturday, 7 May 2005 11:50:11 UTC