At 1/16/2007 08:55 AM, Andrew Ingram wrote:
I know these tags are only supposed to be used for presentational
rather than semantic emphasis, but i've been struggling to come up
with examples of when they would be used.
The only situation I can think of when there is an established
visual standard for certain things that don't really have a semantic emphasis.
For example, when listing somebody's academic qualifications the
standard is to display the institution in italics but i'd say that
it's not appropriate to use <em>.
A. Ingram, MEng <i>Warw</i>
Does anyone know of any other legitimate uses of these tags?
Andrew,
I differ with your assertion that the institution names in your
documents don't have semantic emphasis. It's precisely because of
the semantic singularity of institution names that leads you to
italicize them in the first place.
A strong argument against using such presentational elements as <i>
and <u> in markup is that thenceforth the markup, not the stylesheet,
determines exactly how the information will be presented; you've lost
some of the beauty and functionality of that separation we strive
for, but without gaining anything significant from the sacrifice.
When you or your organization eventually changes this decision of how
institution names (and potentially other terms) will be presented in
the websites you've marked up, the then-current webmeisters will be
faced with three unhappy choices:
- Replace selected <i> tags in the markup. That's stupid manual work
for overly qualified workers, resisted and economically
prohibitive. If you've used <i> for other terms in addition to
institutions, a global replacement won't likely suffice.
- Not change the styling because it's too much work, sacrificing
presentational goals that would otherwise be easy to meet.
- Apply non-italic styling to the italic tag. This essentially means
using the <i> tag to mean <institution> which might not be practical
if by then you've gone over to the dark side and have used <i> to
mark up other types of text that you wish (today) to be
italicized. I feel uncomfortable with that kind of semantic
re-purposing of HTML because it separates your markup from the public
body of convention that gives our markup meaning in the first
place. Until we mark up our documents in pure XML I believe the
smarter course is something along the lines of <span
class="institution">. That's future-friendly -- only does it make
for flexible styling but also it indicates the semantic purpose of
the text fragments in question, making your documents more machine-readable.
I find the argument that classed spans are 'too heavy' to be
specious. Disk space and bandwidth continue to grow and get cheaper;
let's not sacrifice the meaning of our documents to either the
almighty penny or the almighty millisecond.
Regards,
Paul
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