RE: kelvSYC's Thoughts on the new XHTML Draft

Christoph Päper wrote:

>>> I thought the style attribute was soundly defeated in an earlier
>>> debate...?
>> 
>> Quite the opposite.  It boiled down to the professional web community
>> (individuals and companies) demonstrating real-world use/need-cases,
> 
> Mostly quick hacks, CSS test suites and doubtable use of HTML as a
> copy&paste meta language surrogating RTF etc.

Well put.  It's the same mentality that gave birth to <font>.  Cheap FOs.
Merely well-formed MS-Word HTML.  Etc. 

Unfortunately, the number of people clamoring for such a beast evidently
outweighs those wanting semantic markup.  It comes down to a) ignoring it in
your own markup, and b) using tools like Tidy and regex to strip it out of
"inherited" markup.

>> As fantasai noted, STRONG means more <em>phasis.
> 
> I believe that subthread definitely has shown that "em em" is not
> exactly equal to "strong". 

Nested <em>'s to create a <strong> is one of the silliest things I've come
across.  

> If one wanted to remove 'strong', it would be better mapped to 
> something like '<em weight="strong">', '<em level="2">' or the 
> like.

Not that that would be bad in itself, but the paradigm and mapping in
*visual* media of <em> rendered by default as italics and <strong> as bold
is one that has pretty much taken root.  I see no good reason to throw that
out the window, certainly at this point.
 
>>> sub and sup Elements:
>>> Presentational.  Remove it.
>> 
>> I used to think that too, and was convinced of the contrary.
> 
> Although I wasn't quite convinved, I now believe they provide the most
> practical solution. Everything else would just mess stuff up.

Furthermore, should occasional references to snippets like "2<sup>4</sup>"
warrant the full apparatus of MathML?  Especially if we have to jump through
namespace hoops?


/Jelks

Received on Monday, 12 May 2003 14:35:15 UTC