John Blumel wrote:
On Apr 23, 2005, at 10:49am, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
Because the WP markup is layout markup, using
<i> is perfectly okay,
unfortunately... Because we editors are stupid, we do not deserve
semantic markup - that's what I was told more than once by the
developers.
But why do you think the semantics of <i> are really any different from
<em>?
That's the fun part, of course. *Nobody's ever going to know or care*
that you used <em> instead of <i> or <i> instead of <em>. :) To
someone
viewing the page, it's not going to make a difference.
But if someone _were_ to care, <i> is more appropriate because it
doesn't claim to have semantic meaning contrary to actual usage.
Frankly, I think the whole i/em, b/strong thing was a
mistake in the
original HTML spec. Each pair is really synonymous and having both is
redundant -- and the distinctions about when to use one verses the other
are completely artificial.
It's not just <em> and <strong>.
<em> and <strong> are listed in the standard[1] along with other
semantic elements like <dfn>, <code>, <samp>, <kbd>, <var>,
<cite>,
<abbr>, and <acronym>. If you write out some text in each of those
styles, you'll note that several of them have the same typical
appearance as some of the others: italics, or bold, or a monospaced
font. <em> doesn't have a monopoly on italic-styled text, so picking
<em> to represent _any_ italicized text would be semantically wrong.
<i> and <b> are listed[2] with other purely typographic elements like
<tt>, <big>, <small>, <strike>, <s>, and <u>.
The set of semantic elements available presumably lies in HTML's origins
as online technical documentation at a science lab... in a really
full-featured semantic environment for an encyclopedia we'd have
different markup for <ship>, <literarywork>, <foreign>, etc... We
don't
have all those, though, and it's dubious whether we'd get any benefit
out of the effort of maintaining such extra codes. We do support some of
the HTML semantic elements like <em>, <code> and <var>, but we have no
special wiki-specific markup for any of them and I don't think they're
explicitly used very often.
[1]
HTML 4:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1
HTML 3:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#phrase
HTML 2:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_5.html#SEC5.7.1
[2]
HTML 4:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/graphics.html#h-15.2.1
HTML 3:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#font-style
HTML 2:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_5.html#SEC5.7.2
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)