Re: opposite of em

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Tonico Strasser wrote:

> Has anybody considered a new element that is simply the opposite of the
> em (emphasis) element?

It has been discussed on various fora, though mostly just as a general
idea. See e.g.
http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=de-emphasis&as_ugroup=comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html

It should be a relatively simple change, and a logical move, to have, say,
<deem> to indicate that the content is less important than normal text.
(We don't have much better definition for <em> or <strong>, do we?)

Authors might not be that enthusiastic, though, since they are used to
using <small> or other font-changing markup or CSS feature. But it would
still be a logical move, just as <strong> is logically an improvement over
the much more commonly used <b> or <font> for strong emphasis. Just as for
<em> and <strong>, <deem> could have different renderings depending on the
presentation media and browser. An intelligent browser could, for example,
show <deem> in reduced font size, reduced line-height, and with a small
left margin to take it away from the main flow of content, and change it
to normal text on mouseover, then back on mouseout,

Maybe this is where I should stop, since presented that way, it sounds
like a simple and good idea. But I cannot help asking why the emphasis and
de-emphasis elements should be restricted to text-level content. The main
reason for this question in this context is that typical renderings of
<deem> would actually work well for blocks only. Besides, de-emphasizing a
table for example (say, a table of secondary data, adjacent to a primary
table) would become awkward if you had to put <deem> inside each cell
separately.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Thursday, 1 April 2004 06:40:08 UTC