Steve Bennett wrote:
On 6/24/06, Tels <nospam-abuse(a)bloodgate.com>
wrote:
I didn't see that question. And even if it
would be renamed, then we would
now miss a way to tag poems as poems, and not as "something usefull
including poems, cook recipes and whatever". :)
So, Use <poem> for poems, and invent something else for, well, something
else :-D
Some more background on this <poem> tag would help. Are there any
other instances where we have purely semantic tags?
You seem to be implying that you think we should only introduce purely
semantic tags if we already have other semantic tags. You therefore seem
to be of the opinion that unsemantic tags are favourable in a context
where most mark-up is already unsemantic. But if this was the case, then
surely HTML would not have introduced things like <em> and <strong> and
deprecated things like <font>, and instead have introduced things like
<marquee> or <blink>.
So, the reason <poem> was made a semantic tag is because semantic tags
are good, independently of whether we already have semantic tags or not.
Imagine we use the same tag for poems and for cooking recipes. Some time
in the future we decide we actually want the mark-up to behave slightly
(or even completely) differently for recipes. This is why we need
separate mark-up for separate purposes.
And yes, I know that ideally this reasoning also calls for separate
mark-ups that are currently all handled with '' (emphasis, maths
variables, song/film titles, etc.). Obviously in this situation it is
futile to hope for the ideal. Doesn't mean we have to create the same
suboptimal situation in something as rarely-used as poems, though.
Timwi