Re: Psychology and usefulness

Ka-Ping Yee once wrote...
> 
> 
> In article <173DA10049S86.FLAVELL@cernvm.cern.ch>,
> Alan J Flavell <FLAVELL@cernvm.cern.ch> wrote:
> >
> >I'm going to admit that when I'm marking up pages in a hurry, I
> >do tend to use <b> and <i> when I really mean em or strong.  But I
> >don't extol that as a virtue - I know it's poor style.
> 
> You know, there's some very unfortunate human psychology happening
> here.  When HTML was designed, why did they have to make <b> and
> <i> so much SHORTER than <em> and <strong> ?  Everyone shrinks away
> a little from typing six times as much everywhere they want emphasis...
> 
> And so people take the easiest way out.  (I declare myself guilty
> on some occasions as well.)  But i do hope that these kinds of issues
> will no longer be ignored.  Sure, we want a good content-based standard,
> but it doesn't hurt to have one that people tend to use because it has
> more apparent convenience.

I don't know if SGML supports the concept, but couldn't certain throwback
tags like <i> and <b> be interpreted in the new standard as aliases for
<em> and <strong>, with the goal of deprecating them in a future standard?

-- 
   %%%%%% mikebat@clark.net %%%%%% http://www.clark.net/pub/mikebat/ %%%%%%

Received on Monday, 17 July 1995 11:11:15 UTC