On 17/12/2011 06:35, Nick Sabalausky wrote: <snip>
But if it's<i>just</i> ordinary text that simply needs to be<b>bolded</b> or<i>italicized</i>, then handling it in any roundabout way like that is just<i>ridiculous</i> (and "self-documenting" would be completely inapplicable).
You miss the point - why would you need to bold or italicise "ordinary text"? If the point is to illustrate what bold looks like, or what italics look like, _then_ it might make sense to use presentational markup....
In such a situation, replacing hardcoded bold or italic with some vague concept of "emphasis" (old-school example: the<em> tag)
<em> isn't really an old-school example. It's the proper semantic markup for emphasis.
or "extra-emphasis", etc, is not only a useless abstraction merely for the sake of abstraction, it<b><i>can</i></b> subtly change meaning/interpretation of the actual<i>content</i> because only the<i>author</i>, not the stylist, is able to look at the final result and know whether the result <b><i>correctly</i></b> depicts the amount/type of emphasis intended.
It seems to me that the essence of what you're saying is that the choice of <em> and <strong> is too coarse-grained for your purposes. I'm not sure how best to deal with this either. Moreover, what markup are you going to use so that it looks/sounds/feels right in non-graphical browsers?
Additionally, how does the stylist know if a given styling is going to cause too much visual noise? Or be too visually monotone? They<i>can't</i>, because it's<i>completely</i> dependent on the text that the <b><i>author</i></b> writes. It might be too much visual stuff for one article and just right for another. Only the text's author can know what's appropriate, not the stylesheet.
If the author is overusing emphasis, manually setting font weights and stuff to compensate seems to me to be trying to fix the wrong problem.
Stewart.
