Re: Structure Again!

At 7:45 AM -0800 11/24/00, William Loughborough wrote:
>At 01:42 PM 11/24/00 +0000, Alan J. Flavell wrote:
>But in HTML, when properly used, a marking of <b> could mean quite a 
>number of things
>Not the least of which is that you've used a deprecated element <g>!

Which is just a matter of trivia.  If a tag generally "works" and meets
the needs of the user, there you go.  <b> is no more different from
the following, which is _not_ deprecated:

<span style="font-weight: bold;">this is the same as the &lt;b&gt;
tag</span>

The above is not deprecated, and is, in fact, perfectly valid XHTML.
However, it has the exactly same effect as <b> -- and is likely even
_less_ accessible to people with disabilities.  (Why?  Because most
assistive tech that reads HTML can understand what to do with a
<b> tag, but to understand the latter requires an understanding of
CSS, which is more difficult.)

So the issue of "deprecated or not" is ultimately moot; what is more
important is that we grow above issues of sainted or demonized
tags, and instead concentrate on higher principles.  Tags will come
and go in varying degrees of support, and concentrating on them as
the "important thing" is merely misguided focus on tag trivia.

--Kynn
-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Monday, 27 November 2000 14:35:30 UTC