- From: Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@myrealbox.com>
- Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2007 00:52:05 -0400
On Oct 30, 2007, at 4:33 AM, Ian Hickson wrote: > ... > On Sun, 15 Jan 2006, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: > ... >> Authors should use presentational markup whenever there is no >> available semantic markup for the relevant meaning, or when they are >> providing authoring facilities for people who cannot be expected to >> think about semantic markup (e.g. people using Webmail, or people >> posting comments on the author's Weblog). If authors -- or >> specifications -- try too hard to use a semantic element, or to force >> other people to use it, it will be misused so much that UAs can no >> longer trust the element to have any particular meaning, so it will >> become de facto presentational. > > True... but it's not clear if elements like <font> and <center> are the > best way of addressing this. Right, because there's no semantic element that their absence tempts people to use instead. (Whereas omitting <b> and <i> would tempt people to use <em> for italics and <strong> for bold instead.) > ... >> <i> >> This has always been presentational, and will continue to be so in >> the majority of HTML 5 documents. Most authors will assume it has >> the same purpose as it did in previous versions of HTML; and many >> of the authors who actually read that part of the spec will giggle >> at the "instance of a term" frippery and disregard it. > > This has changed since you commented on it, I believe. Now it's still > "presentational", but it is at least media-independent, being defined > in a way that is still usable in speech contexts. Yes, the current definition makes much more sense, though it buries the point a bit. I think it would be more obvious to begin something like "The i element represents a span of text where the typical typographical presentation is italics, and no other element is more appropriate. (For example, citations should instead use the cite element..." > ... > (I strongly feel that there is a difference between <div> used for > grouping thematically related blocks, and <p> used for separating > thematically related inline content, e.g. parts of a form. > ... Launchpad.net presents (for people registered) many forms where a text field has not just a label, but also an explanatory caption of one or two (or in one case five) sentences. These captions are unambiguously paragraphs <p>, inside form rows <div>, inside forms <form>. If we wanted to "separat[e] thematically related ... parts of a form" we wouldn't use <p>; we'd use <fieldset>, because that's *exactly* what <fieldset> is for. Cheers -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
Received on Thursday, 1 November 2007 21:52:05 UTC