Re: Nullifying insidious HTML 3.2 constructs

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> Heh, they can be useful though:
>   <http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2004/05/02/b-and-i>
>
> Not always, but sometimes.

While the article makes interesting points about B and I markup,
and especially the pseudo-structural abuse of STRONG and EM,
I'm afraid the discussion has got rather off-topic for the www-style
list. The original question was an interesting one, but I think the issue
of "nullifying" settings (setting properties to their defaults in some
sense) has been discussed rather often, and "nullifying" HTML 3.2
constructs does not add much to it. On the practical side, using
the 'inherit' keyword is fairly ineffective today, due to lack of support
on IE 6, and explicitly setting to what you regard as default
(e.g., font-size: 100%) works better. But on the theoretical side,
'inherit' is just the way to "kill" FONT markup, making rendering the
same as it would be if the FONT markup did not exist.

If anyone has some information on the claims (in the cited document) about
the utilization of DL, DT, and DD markup in Google's definition search,
please contact me off-list. (I have not found any evidence for such
behavior, though it would highly desirable. And the cited document's
author has not wanted to make his E-mail address easy to find.)

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Saturday, 19 February 2005 04:28:46 UTC