- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 18:01:48 +0300
- To: Jacques Steyn <Jacques.Steyn@infotech.monash.edu>
- Cc: public-html@w3.org, www-html@w3.org
On May 4, 2007, at 12:43, Jacques Steyn wrote: > If a user sees a *b* or *i* button on the interface, that does not > mean the authoring tool should write a tag in the code that says > *i*. If logic and presentation should be kept separate (which I > strongly support), the coding agent could even write > <span style="font-style: italic">blah blah</span>. > Programmatically this string of code and *i* would be handled > exactly the same. If authors use <i> or <em>, aural UAs can easily attach presentation styles to these so that they are rendered differently for normal text. If authors use font-style: italic, a non-visual UA has to examine the computed style for the visual media in order to determine which runs of text should stand out of normal text. > On *i* and *em*: some have stated that *em* is semantic. That is > debatable. Their de jure definition matters remarkably little. When tools like Dreamweaver emit <em> when the user presses command-i, for practical purposes markup consumers cannot perform any more semantic reasoning from <em> than they can from <i>. I'm in awe that some people seem to genuinely believe that changing an identifier from one string to another magically adds semantics. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Friday, 4 May 2007 15:02:06 UTC