- From: Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@myrealbox.com>
- Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:25:52 +1300
On Jan 12, 2007, at 5:23 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote: > ... > The introduction of <em> and <strong> (circa 1993) has failed to > achieve a semantic improvement over <i> and <b>, because prominent > tools such as Dreamweaver, Tidy, IE and Opera as well as simplified > well-intentioned advocacy treat <em> and <strong> merely as more > fashionable alternatives to <i> and <b>. (I mean failure in terms of > what meaning a markup consumer can extract from the real Web without a > private agreement with the producer of a given Web page. I don't mean > the ability of authors to write style sheets for their own markup.) > ... Is the effort to get people to use CSS instead of spacer GIFs a bad idea? Is the effort to get people to use <h1>..<h6> instead of <p><b> or <p><font> a bad idea? Is the effort to get people to use CSS instead of <table> for layout a bad idea? There were, I'm sure, many more occurrences of those problems than there were improper uses of <em> and <strong>. And the efforts to replace them are much older than the effort to get people who don't think about semantics to use <b> and <i>, which has hardly even started yet. Ten years ago, the typical Web developer probably didn't know what <em> and <strong> were. Now, the typical Web developer probably thinks that <b> and <i> are dirty and that XHTML is the future. This does not mean all is lost, it just means the standards advocates oversteered. Time for another adjustment. > ... > Insisting on the difference of <i> and <em> is not without harm, > because arguing about which one to use is not without opportunity > cost. > ... "Not without" makes that statement look more profound than it is. -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
Received on Thursday, 11 January 2007 19:25:52 UTC