RE: How about a <notice>element?

Christoph Päper wrote:
<<<
Personally I'd like to have an element to mark up numbers with
(currency,
date, with suffixed SI dimension etc. -- see your spreadsheet program),
<number> or <value> maybe.
>>>

This is a good idea. Actually, on the topic of spreadsheets, what would
be very nice is a location-neutral way of marking up dates and times.
Unfortunately, I can only think of really ugly ways to do it. So, let's
set those aside for the time being.

In any case:

I'm not that interested in spreading tag bloat. However, XHTML simply
***does not*** have the minimal toolset needed for full structural
markup of even the most basic application it was originally designed
for, that is, academic papers. I want to use all-structural,
all-semantic markup as much as I can, but sadly in many cases, that
isn't very much. Defining a standard way to indicate, say, an abstract
section would be very useful. 

So where do we draw the line? Well, hell, I don't know. I do think that
enough tags to cover the minimal structure of an average academic paper
would be a good guiding star to go by, since that was what HTML was
originally designed to do. So, anyway, here's an unordered list of stuff
that it seems would be valuable additions.

* Caption tags for images, as was previously suggested
* A small canonical set of <section> classes, or just block-level tags,
for major aspects of a paper (abstract/summary, body of text, notes,
etc.)
* <term> seems quite reasonable. Indeed, it seems like the obvious
complement to <dfn>, which marks up only the definiens, not the
definiendum. In fact, I don't know why such a tag was not already in
HTML.
* "Key passage" tag for scanning (& replacement for <strong>), as
previously suggested

This seems like a reasonable and small number of things to add which
would greatly reduce the dependence on <span>, <div>, and similar
non-semantic markups  -- my dependence on them, anyway.

-C

Received on Tuesday, 13 August 2002 03:26:40 UTC