Re: samp, kbd, var

Tina Holmboe wrote:

>   This started going silly when <menu> was taken out because it
>   "rendered like an ul".

It's a shame that menu was taken out, as that situation was effectively 
the exact opposite to this: I'm proposing taking out sub/sup because 
"it's merely their default visual rendering that is supposed to infer a 
variety of meanings, depending on context and printed word tradition".

> Granted, sup and sub and samp and goddess knows
>   what might not belong in HTML for various reasons - but we've got
>   them.

Again, if these aren't dealt with, they'll just be dragged around into 
XHTML 2.0. final - and there's no excuse of backwards compatibility here 
anymore, so it'd be a perfect opportunity to expunge them.

> Lets take out the things that /really/ shouldn't be there,
>   repair the bits we've got, and recreate a simple, but powerful,
>   generic language.

samp,keyb,var,sup and sub go directly against this idea of a "generic 
language" though, imho. The first three are far from generic, and 
specific only to a very minor part of the possible content that can be 
marked up in XHTML 2.0 (so why do these particular edge cases, in the 
grand scheme of things, get their own elements?); the last two are not 
adequate to describe meaning, but only the traditional visual 
representation of meaning (again, exactly the same as the reason why 
bold and italic were kicked out).

If we want generic, let's be consistent about it then. Otherwise I want 
<i> back because traditionally, names of ships are presented in italic, 
but it wouldn't be right to use <em>...

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Tuesday, 22 August 2006 19:46:38 UTC