- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 00:54:25 +0300 (EEST)
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Toby A Inkster wrote: > I think it would be nice if <small> were left in XHTML 2 for this > purpose, and that the spec specifically said that the default rendering > for the element needn't be a reduced font size. (In many media -- tty or > aural, for instance -- font size simply doesn't make sense anyway!) It would be an interesting idea to define <small> as de-emphasis element, if a new version of HTML, compatible with HTML 4, were being defined. But since compatibility is to be broken, there's little reason to preserve any names due to tradition. Besides, even in a hypothetical extension to HTML 4, <small> as de-emphasis is somewhat problematic. There are probably pages that use <small> just to reduce font size, e.g. in a misguided (or sometimes sensible) attempt so "save space". For example, it is not completely absurd to use <small>ACME</small> in normal text just to make uppercase-only initialisms look less disturbing (in the lack of adequate tools to produce real small-caps). -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Tuesday, 6 April 2004 17:54:28 UTC