Re: code, samp, kbd, var

On 5/15/07, Tina Holmboe <tina@greytower.net> wrote:

> On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 07:56:59PM +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:

> > as it stands today the <i>, <b>, and <small> elements are not
> > presentational. They stand for mood changes and other text that is neither

>   Not the choice I'd have made; nor the choice I wish the WG would
>   make. The problem is, of course, that all three have established
>   use - I quoted one example of why <b> cannot be unambigously
>   interpreted as anything but presentational - that is not
>   compatible with the 'new' interpretation.

Rather, you provided an example of why interpreting <b> that way will
sometimes be incorrect, from the author's Point Of View.  (In my
opinion, a heading is at least a candidate keyword.)

But since the author was using <b> incorrectly according to the
existing draft, where is the harm?  Non-conforming documents continue
to get slightly mis-interpreted, but the precise nature of
misintrepretation is now somewhat standardized across browsers.

If the author doesn't want to be misinterpreted, he or she can correct
the document to be conforming.  (Or, at the least, not declare it to
be HTML5.)

>   Adding elements for this kind of 'mood' change is a good idea, but
>   overloading old ones is not.

As best I can tell, it is a time saver for people who were using the
old spec either correctly, or in a common and defensible manner; it is
different -- but not worse -- for people who were previously producing
rare forms of incorrect markup.

-jJ

Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2007 23:20:25 UTC