- From: John Lewis <lewi0371@mrs.umn.edu>
- Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2003 07:24:45 -0600
- To: www-style@w3.org
Shelby wrote on Friday, January 3, 2003 at 12:33:49 AM: > Notice that this definition of semantics is very broad. It does not > differentiate the the semantics of a header from the opening > sentence of a paragraph. Both "briefly describes the topic of the > section it introduces" > Thus some of the important semantics of header, as different from > first sentence of paragraph, are open to interpretation. > Some parsers might ignore the headers entirely and merge them as > first sentence of first paragraph. CSS can do that by changing the display value of a header to "run-in". That doesn't change the definition of header elements, it simply changes their *appearance*. Changing the display value of all headers to "none" does not mean header elements have no meaning. They still have meaning as defined in HTML--they're just not presented to the user. <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#run-in> I think you're confusing semantics as defined by HTML with semantics as interepreted by a reader. For example, using CSS, I could change the display value (and other values) of nearly every tag in HTML so that to the reader, <em> is a header, <h1> is a paragraph, and <strong> is a blockquote. That does not and cannot change the meaning of those elements as defined in HTML, even though it would fool the average reader with CSS enabled. > That is totally different than changing the rendering such as font > of a header. One is semantically significant, and the other is > merely presentation property. This is a grey area, and especially > the header is a poor example to analyze because it is so broad. Could you prove, or at least explain, how changing the display value of an element is "semantically significant"? >>>>> Shelby Moore wrote: >>>>> CSS selectors allows one to select elements of markup based on >>>>> attributes which are not related to *semantics*. >>>> >>>> Ian Hickson responded: >>>> As an editor of the W3C Selectors Specification, I assure you, >>>> that is most definitely not the intention of CSS selectors. >>> >>> Ian's "assurance" was false. >> >> There are no attributes that are not related to semantics, since >> attributes are part of an element's meaning. > False. Font can be set on a paragraph and font has nothing to do > with the semantics of paragraph. This is 3rd time I have mentioned > that font is not semantically related to paragraph. > John Lewis has written in this thread "CSS doesn't need to know the > markup languages it's applied to, or any markup language at all; > that's the beauty of it. Knowledge of the markup language's elements > is contained in the CSS author, where it belongs.". > John Lewis also restated in another way, "CSS selectors match > elements without regard to the elements' semantics" Attributes are not selectors. I agree with your "Font can be set on a paragraph," etc., but I also agree with Ian's original reply. >> Absolutely, just as CSS can style tags [sic] that have no >> specification. That doesn't mean those elements suddenly gain some >> sort of meaning. > CSS is not and should not be involved in providing meaning. That is > my point. Agreed. In fact, CSS cannot provide, change, or erase meaning, which means changing display values cannot change meaning. I don't think Ian disagrees. -- John
Received on Friday, 3 January 2003 08:26:08 UTC