- From: Norman Gray <n.x.gray@gcal.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 09 Jul 1997 14:31:10 +0100
- To: scottm@danielson.co.uk (Scott Matthewman)
- Cc: <www-html@w3.org>
Greetings, At 14:09 09/07/97 +0100, Scott Matthewman wrote: >I can't think of a valid enough reason why TT shouldn't be deprecated, >since it's a presentational rather than content-based tag. > >Similarly, I think B and I should be deprecated. STRONG and EM are >preferable. True, they're preferable when you want to emphasise things, but there are cases where B and I are still necessary. The most persuasive cases I've seen mentioned are for species' formal names in biology, <i>Homo sapiens</i>, or for foreign words, <i>nota bene</i>. A weaker example is when you're quoting a volume number in a bibliography: <cite>Nature</cite>, <b>100</b>, pp. 20--30. In none of these cases are you emphasising anything, and so inserting them in an EM element would be inaccurate. In the absence of elements like SPECIESNAME, or BORROWEDWORD or VOLUME (which we can't reasonably have until we get XML), there's no unambiguous way of expressing these other than falling back on long standing typographical convention. It's more difficult to think of a good reason for TT, but I'm sure there must be some (legitimate/non-presentational) messages which would be confused if CODE, for example, weren't in a monospace font. All the best, Norman ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Norman Gray n.x.gray@gcal.ac.uk Department of Computer Studies, room M627A 0141 331 3288 Glasgow Caledonian University, G4 0BA, UK
Received on Wednesday, 9 July 1997 09:33:59 UTC