Re: Cleaning House

Patrick H. Lauke:
> So should there be a need for a document containing <small>, for  
> instance, to pass conformance checks?

The least thing the specification should do is to list previously  
valid element and attribute names and call them "reserved". Checkers  
should ignore them by default.

> Maybe I'm missing something, but why can't the reasoning that saw  
> the removal of TT, BIG and co be applied in the same way to the  
> contentious B, I etc?

Although I am still a bit sceptical about it on purity grounds, I  
currently believe that redefining semantics of long-introduced  
element types is a viable path for a future HTML standard (or  
recommendation or whatever). That is mostly, though, because I have  
given up on the idea of the (commercial) Web being build upon a  
fierce semantic language.

Anyhow, I just remembered I once considered to make a proposal to  
keep |big| for logographic characters inside alphabetic script,  
because they are often unreadable in 16px / 12pt. Incidentally its  
name would remind some of the Taiwanese character set / encoding "Big  
5". (I do not know where that came from.)

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 21:32:17 UTC