Re: Nullifying insidious HTML 3.2 constructs

Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> Philip TAYLOR wrote:
> 
>> I teach the use of <em class="..."> and (where appropriate)
>> <strong class="...">; examples of "..." that I frequently
>> adduce are :
>>
>>     stress (the normal case)
>>     foreign-word
>>     latin-abbreviation
>>     book-title
>>     ship-name
> 
> 
> That sounds pretty stupid IMHO. You do not want to put emphasis on the 
> ship name, you just want it to match the style guide.

Yes, <span class="ship-name"> might be better; I created
the list on the fly, without referring to my notes, but see
below for a defence of <em class="ship-name"> ...

> For book names, how about CITE?

I would normally restrict <CITE> to real citations
(e.g., <cite>Gibson, 1984</cite>), where it would
normally be nested with an <a> element linking to
an entry in the bibliography; I feel uncomfortable
about generalising it to encompass /any/ possible
citation, although such usage is most certainly
defensible.

> (Same for similar examples you gave. It is not s/B/STRONG/ and s/I/EM/.)

I agree with your last sentence,  but not (necessarily) with the
preceding; if HTML lacks a <FOO> element, then which is better :

	<em class="foo"> or <span class="foo">

when the /normal/ typographic representation of a foo leads to
visual emphasis ?

Philip Taylor

Received on Friday, 18 February 2005 14:19:11 UTC