Re: Font Style Elements

Gonzalez, Scott I (GONZASI0) / 2003-02-27 07:14:
> Why have the U, STRIKE, and S elements been deprecated, but not B, I,
> BIG, SMALL, or TT?
> 
> Clearly, style sheet alternatives exist for the B, I, BIG, SMALL, and
> TT elements.  Due to this fact, and the opening sentence for the
> definition of deprecated, "a deprecated element ... is one that has
> been outdated by newer constructs," I see no reason for these
> elements not to be deprecated.  I would greatly appreciate an
> explanation for the survival of these elements.

I think U, STRIKE, S, STRONG, BIG and SMALL should be decprecated but I 
think we should keep B, I and TT.

Sometimes you have content that doesn't cleanly map to any element that 
has semantics and in those cases it would be nice to be able to use 
something like B, I or TT instead of plain SPAN. B, I or TT contain very 
little information about the content, but they contain more information 
than a SPAN.

As for U, STRIKE, S, SMALL and BIG, I think these should go. U shouldn't 
be used anywhere because it's too easily mixed with the links (many user 
agents underline links) and in addition it's used to emphasize the 
content. We already have EM. STRIKE doesn't contain any information that 
DEL couldn't express. BIG is strictly presentational and should be 
replaced with EM where required. SMALL is an border case because we 
don't have an element for "less important than plain text". I think it 
should go we should have something like DEM for de-emphasized.

I think that STRONG should go away too and nested EMs should be used 
instead if more emphasize is required.

-- 
Mikko

Received on Thursday, 27 February 2003 10:02:26 UTC