- From: Jukka Körpelä <jkorpela@cc.hut.fi>
- Date: Wed, 17 Dec 1997 01:32:38 +0200 (EET)
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Tue, 16 Dec 1997, Sue Jordan wrote: > Neil St.Laurent wrote: > ... > > B and I seem so natural and so often used to get rid of them would be > > dangerous. Italics / Bold isn't always meant to draw special > > attention, or to put emphasis on, but often meant to just be > > different from the other text. > > Why not deprecate all of them? (read: relegate to CSS where > they belong) Because CSS gives, at best, a suggestion about a possible rendering for some browsing situations. My favorite examples have been the use of the I element for taxonomic names, like "<I>Homo sapiens</I> L.", and for words used to refer to words themselves, not to those things to which they normally refers, as in "the plural of <I>ox</I> is <I>oxen</I>". They are not _essentially_ presentational but structural. Using italics is definitely the _preferable_ presentation due to common practice of doing so in printed media. So a revised specification of HTML should first give us structured ways of expressing such things before it could deprecate the I element. Please notice that things like structured markup for things like the one in my second example will soon gain importance. It's not just a matter of presentation. For instance, automatic translation systems should of course leave the words "ox" and "oxen" untranslated when translating a grammar on English from English to German. Neither <I> nor any style sheet helps here, of course. Authors need structured markup for such things. > Seems to me that would further the laudable goal of > separation of > presentation from structure. The goal is noble, but we need structured markup before we can deprecate the old stupid way of doing things. Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/
Received on Tuesday, 16 December 1997 18:32:58 UTC