Re: Cleaning House

James Graham wrote:
> purposes. For example blindly replacing <em> with <i> only serves to 
> make it harder for UAs to be sure that <em> is being used to indicate 
> emphasis. By encouraging authors who are not consciously specifying a 

Unfortunately, what has already happened is that <em> has become the 
politically correct way of writing <i>, rather than a means of 
indicating emphasis.

Note that one issue that hasn't been brought up much is that, at least
in print, the typographical convention for emphasis in what may be the 
most rapidly growing language on the web is not italics, but something 
like font-size: 70%.  Simplified Chinese books use smaller type for 
emphasis!

> b) The alternative you suggest; enumerating all common typographical 
> uses of a style and adding one element per use would increase the 

In a compromise language, like HTML, needs to have broad categories, 
and, if typographical rules are at all rational, such categories will 
exist.  It already has some, such as the much underused DFN.  I'm not 
sure that it has one for technical namea that are marked at every use, 
rather than just the first use.

Whether you have a compromise or not, people will still argue about what 
category something falls into.

Received on Saturday, 5 May 2007 08:42:01 UTC