Re: Cleaning House

John Foliot - WATS.ca wrote:
> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> It would be really nice if the advocates of semantic markup based
>> their advocacy on realistic use cases instead of an axiomatic belief
>> that more semantics are good and all presentational features are bad.
> 
> It boils down to this:  If you want to Bold some text, or italicize it, or
> underline it, you are doing so *for a reason*... I don't care really what
> the reason is, you are doing so in a visual way to indicate some connotation
> or other cue/clue to the end "reader", or consumer.

Could you cite some *specific* use cases for which authors would 
typically use <b> and/or <i> due to typographical conventions, that 
would actually benefit in some way from the addition of a specific 
semantic element?  In other words, answer these questions:

* What's the semantics you're trying to represent?
* Whats the use case for the semantics? (Why would authors use it?)
* What problems would a new feature solve?
* Why are <b> and/or <i> unsuitable for the use case/problem?
* What benefit is there for users?
* What benefit is there for authors?
* What benefit is there for implementers?

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 16:26:19 UTC