- From: Jonny Axelsson <jax@opera.no>
- Date: Wed, 07 Aug 2002 14:35:30 +0200
- To: www-html@w3.org
07.08.02 14:15:56, "Ineke van der Maat" <inekemaa@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>Hallo Jonny,
>
>
>You wrote:
>Emphasis on the other hand is worth saving, but not in the form:
> <p><em>Hey, this paragraph is italic!</em></p>
> <p><em>My, and so is this.</em></p>
> <p><em>Look at those paragraphs tilt!</em></p>
>What is wrong with this,
What I intended to show was that if we take away the easy way to achieve
what people want (here italic type), they would use something else instead.
That "something else" would then drown out by this hack, the same way
blockquote could have ended up becoming meaningless as "the indenting
mechanism in HTML", if it hadn't been for CSS, tables and the wonderfully
stretching 1x1 GIF giving the same.
>I use it sometimes to get the emphasis effect also in these browsers..when
>I want to stress something..
>Italic in css does not help, because most text-only-browsers can not work
>with css.
This bothers me a little and makes be ambivalent on whether it is a good
idea to remove B and I. While they indisputably have disadvantages, I think
the final outcome will be (at best) pages chock-full of spans, and
<span class="italic"> isn't really an improvement of <b> and <i>.
The other problem is as you mentioned devices with limited graphical
capabilities, and similar text formats as well. The best way to convert to
these would be to retain the typographical information, and a
straightforward conversion from "<i>...</i>" to "\italic{...}" (or whatnot)
is some orders of magnitude easier than going through the CSS cascade.
But if you accept b and i, shouldn't you accept u and tt, and if you accept
u and tt, shouldn't you...
Jonny Axelsson,
Documentation,
Opera Software
Received on Wednesday, 7 August 2002 08:35:08 UTC