Re: Cleaning House

At 03:46 AM 5/6/2007 +0200, Terje Bless wrote:

>murray@muzmo.com (Murray Maloney) wrote:
>
>>At 05:26 PM 5/5/2007 +0100, Philip & Le Khanh wrote:
>>>Forgive my na\"\i vety, but which authority are you citing when
>>>you make this statement ?
>>
>>The authority of someone with 30+ years as a technical writer,
>>20+ years in SGML, HTML, XML and so on, and an original member
>>of the earliest HTML Working Groups.
>
>Ah, good old argumentum ad verecundiam. Somehow I suspect this was not the 
>meaning of the word “authority” Philip intended in his query. 
>Although, with that weight of expertise I can understand how you might get 
>them confused.

Ah well, then feel free to dismiss my contribution.

Do you need a citation that somewhat supports my position?

How about the June 1993 Internet Draft for HTML:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt

[[
         EM                      Emphasis, typically italic.
         STRONG  Stronger emphasis, typically bold.
         B                       Boldface, where available, otherwise 
alternative mapping allowed.
         I               Italic font (or slanted if italic unavailable).
]]

I reordered the list to suit my purposes. In 1993 Tim and Dan realized that 
B and I
might be mapped to other typefaces. Since the evolution of CSS, everyone has
understood how easy it is to re-map <b> and <i>. So you see, <b> and <i>
do not force the use of bold or italic typefaces -- they merely suggest as much
by falling back to bold and italic in most graphical UIs.

Regards,

Murray

Received on Sunday, 6 May 2007 14:50:43 UTC