Re: "Presentational" vs. "Legacy"

On Mon, 03 Apr 2000 12:54:26 +0200, Jonny Axelsson
<jonny@metastasis.net> wrote:

>U, S and FONT are deprecated, and rightly so IMHO.
>
>BI(TT) are in a different category. My thought about this here:
><http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Feb/0250.html>
>I'm as for semantic elements as the next guy, but a pre-requisite is that
>there is some agreed semantic value to them (that's why I'm for killing off
>STRONG, it doesn't make sense).

Ok, I have read your archived post, and at the risk of "beating an
already dead animal" here, I have a different view...

Humans have 5 senses, but so far I have not seen any technical devices
that would let me "smell" or "taste" my way through a www document, so
that leaves us with three than can be (and are) used.

           Eyes     Ears     Fingertips
===============================================
  I        Yes      ???      maybe?
  EM       Yes      Yes      Yes?
  B        Yes      ???      maybe?
  STRONG   Yes      Yes      blood sample? :)
===============================================

Frankly I don't know exactly what an "italic voice" or a "bold voice"
sounds like, but I do know about an "emphasized voice" as well as a
"strong voice".

Likewise I don't know if there is any notion of "italic" or "bold"
available in braille, but I suspect that "emphasized" and "strong"
braille impacts may be available.

I just feel that in markup we would all benefit from using element names
that makes sense for more than just those who can read things from paper
or a VDU.

And relying on stylesheets (as in 'EM EM {...}' to replace STRONG) is
not the way to go. Stylesheets are _optional_ and a correct and
understandable presentation shall be possible without them.

Those who are thinking of publishing "well formed only" xml docs on the
www may want to contemplate a bit about that, before they go ahead.
There's no guarantee that every user agent out there will be stylesheet
capable. I know at least one right now that is not, it's called
AltaVista IMMIC :)

Basically, on the www, the "meaning" of element content in a document
shall not be carried in a "required" stylesheet presentation suggestion,
it's as simple as that.

-- 
Jan Roland Eriksson <jrexon@newsguy.com>
<URL:http://member.newsguy.com/%7Ejrexon/>

Received on Monday, 3 April 2000 13:59:10 UTC