- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2007 19:19:43 +0200
On Jan 8, 2007, at 20:21, Simon Pieters wrote: > I think it is no surprise that most UAs will implement this as > emitting <em> for CTRL+I and <stong> for CTRL+B, or similar > interfaces that imply that the user actually requested italics or > bold with (to the UA) unknown intended semantics. (IE and Opera > emit <em> and <strong>, Safari emits <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" > style="font-weight: bold;">.) I think <i> and <b> should be emitted > instead, and the above text should reflect that. Two of the four implementations that the WHATWG cares about interoperate. Is it worthwhile to disrupt that situation?especially considering that changes to Trident are the hardest for the WHATWG to induce? My conclusion is that semantic markup has failed in this case. <em> and <i> are both used primarily to achieve italic rendering on the visual media. <strong> and <b> are both primarily used to achieve bold rendering on the visual media. Regardless of which tags authors type or which tags their editor shortcuts produce, authors tend to think in terms of encoding italicizing and bolding instead of knowingly articulating their profound motivation for using italics or bold. Even those who have heard about the theoretical reasons for using <em> and <strong> tend to decide which one to use based on which one has the preferred default visual presentation for the case at hand. <em>, <strong>, <i> and <b> have all been in HTML for over a decade. I think that?s long enough to see what happens in the wild. I think it is time to give up and admit that there are two pairs of visually- oriented synonyms instead of putting more time, effort, money, blog posts, spec examples and discussion threads into educating people about subtle differences in the hope that important benefits will be realized once people use these elements the ?right? way. Compare with: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1137799947&count=1 Incidentally, this morning I came across this: http://www.elementary-group-standards.com/html/and-all-that-html5- malarkey.html In particular, this caught my eye: ?<b> has been deprecated. Replacing <b> with <strong> suffices.? (I checked the schema, and, sure enough, <b> was not there. It turns out that it wasn?t in the spec when I last reviewed that part of the schema. It is in the spec now.) My point here is that the reaction was to simply replace <b> with <strong>. As for Safari, I have noticed even stranger behavior. See http:// hsivonen.iki.fi/kesakoodi/clipboard/ I think using span with a style attribute is a bad idea in this case. Italicizing a word or two in a paragraph is not incidental style that could easily be considered optional. It is a more essential part of the text that should be preserved when the content is formatted for a different display environment possibly with a different font. Hence, it makes sense to use an italicizing element. P.S. I don?t believe semantic markup to be axiomatically better than presentational markup. Semantic markup shouldn?t be an end in itself. When semantic markup doesn't serve a useful end, such as media independence or particularly useful data mining, in *practice*, there is no point. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Tuesday, 9 January 2007 09:19:43 UTC