- From: Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>
- Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 00:14:41 +0100
- To: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- CC: public-html@w3.org, www-html@w3.org
Boris Zbarsky wrote: > Some people are > suggesting that it should fall on the pure-semantic end of things > (without really explaining how this is supposed to work given a very > limited vocabulary and the desire to express a wide variety of complex > concepts). By expanding the limited vocabulary. It worked for new additions like <audio>, <video>, <eventsource>, <datagrid> etc because it makes making Web Applications easier, so why can't there be slightly more granular markup for other elements which are a bit more of a catch-all at this stage? > Note that internationalization, accessibility and useability are not > necessarily incompatible with presentational markup, within reason. From an accessibility point of view, presentational markup can be treated in roughly two ways: - ignore it, as it's just presentational and doesn't actually convey meaning/content; obviously, this presupposes that its use was indeed purely whimsical, rather than down to the author's lack of knowledge of why/when to choose structural/semantic markup (marking up a paragraph as big and bold - via <font> and <b> - instead of using h1-h6 elements), or the spec's lack of more suitable alternatives - divine meaning out of it, based on known cases of misuse or some other heuristics (for instance, a screen reader could potentially make a best guess and assume that if it comes across a lone paragraph with its content wrapped in <font> and <b> that it's possibly a heading in disguise); this can be error prone, and shifts the onus completely on the user agent / assistive technology. > Your point was that <sup> and <sub> are somehow more semantic than <i> > and <b>. I don't agree with that point. Me neither. > Further, <strong> is about that non-semantic as well (what > does it _mean_ exactly?). Same for <em>. I dislike the practically non-existent distinction between <em> and <strong>...always makes for puzzled faces when I explain structural markup fundamentals to our content authors. I'd therefore welcome a disambiguation, which probably would mean a single element to cover both cases. > A real semantic emphasis tag, imo, would indicate not only that there is > emphasis, but _why_, because depending on the situation different > reasons for emphasis should be treated differently. Of course you'd > need different markup for each reason for emphasis. I still believe that being able to abstractly say "this is more important than the surrounding context" is a step forward from "this should be visually presented in bold". I agree that it gets unwieldy very quickly if we want to define distinct elements for every different shade of why something is important. P -- Patrick H. Lauke ______________________________________________________________ re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively [latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.] www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk http://redux.deviantart.com ______________________________________________________________ Co-lead, Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force http://webstandards.org/ ______________________________________________________________ Take it to the streets ... join the WaSP Street Team http://streetteam.webstandards.org/ ______________________________________________________________
Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 23:14:44 UTC