On 17/12/2011 18:09, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Stewart Gordon"<smjg_1...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:jci2bj$225s$1...@digitalmars.com...
<snip>
<em> isn't really an old-school example. It's the proper semantic markup
for emphasis.
Ok. It was a dedicated HTML tag instead of a span/div with class attribute.
Seems like most of those are non-kosher these days.
<snip>
I think half these tags just fell out of fashion when somebody invented the likes of <b>
and <i>. It was probably for a combination of reasons:
- fewer characters to type
- it's just one tag to remember for bold, and one for italics, rather than lots of
different ones for emphasis, terms being defined, book titles, addresses, variables in
mathematical expressions, biological taxa, foreign words/phrases, etc.
- no discrete set of semantic elements can be sure of covering _all_ possible things bold
and italics may be used to denote.
- people wanted, in a time before CSS, to be able to "force" certain rendering, as opposed
to the potentially application-dependent rendering of semantic elements.
And so it stuck. It's perhaps as a concession to these that HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 have
kept <b> and <i> even in strict mode.
I recall reading somewhere that in HTML5, they are redefined along the lines of "stuff
that is typically printed in bold" and "stuff that is typically printed in italics". But
just looking at the current working draft:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/text-level-semantics.html#the-i-element
"The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise
offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a
taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a
thought, or a ship name in Western texts."
"The b element represents a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian
purposes without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of an alternate
voice or mood, such as key words in a document abstract, product names in a review,
actionable words in interactive text-driven software, or an article lede."
Stewart.
