- From: Daniel W. Connolly <connolly@beach.w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 23:04:36 -0400
- To: Ka-Ping Yee <kryee@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
- Cc: www-html@www10.w3.org
In message <199507170434.AAA09521@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>, Ka-Ping Yee write s: > >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> ? I'll answer that by passing the buck: I borrowed the tag names directly from GNU TeXinfo. If I had it to do over again, there would only be three phrase-markup elements: <em>, <tt>, and <??> where ?? is b or something like it. They're short, almost meaningless worlets that mean, respectively, emphasized, machine-like, and strongly-emphasized. (pretty close to TeX's <em>, <b>, <tt>, though it also adds <sl> and a few others, as I recall...) When I added all those others (<var>, <cite>, ...) I was overly influenced by my experience with technical documentation. HTML is a very broad, very shallow, generic SGML application. It captures common communications idioms, and should not go deeply into technical documentation strucures -- nor annual reports, nor advertising idioms, nor legal document structures, nor scholarly document structures, nor any of the other "vertical" applications toward which is being pulled. Dan p.s. Think Stylesheets[1] [1] http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Style/
Received on Tuesday, 18 July 1995 23:06:50 UTC