fantasai wrote: > Brian Heinrich wrote: > >>On 11 Jul 2002, it is alleged that fantasai sauntered in to >>netscape.public.mozilla.documentation and loudly proclaimed: > > ... > > All good points, of course. I would hardly say "loudly proclaimed", though, > since I did slip almost all of that in with an example I originally wrote > up to demonstrate the use of class="para" in the Markup Guide. :) I don't > claim any expertise in technical documentation; this bit of text you're > tearing apart is just my reaction to some of the online documentation I've > had to read. As for lists, you might want to re-read the actual text of my > message and then compare the rendered result of the example with what would > be the text if I had forced that list into paragraph form. > > >>Most often, yes. There are various ways in which to go about this. (BTW, >>fantasai, this is part of my problem with structural/semantic tags: there >>are time I want to highlight information in a purely physical/presentational >>way, and often the rationale for doing so is simply to give a bit of >>guidance to a reader who might just be skimming the text.) > > > But using <b> to do so will not help anyone without a graphical browser. At least > if you declare your intent--which is to highlight the information--someone can > write the necessary style rules for devices with other capabilities.
But that's the intent with b and i. Highlighting is presentational. The fact that non-graphical browsers highlight things differently just means they have a different presentation. Non-graphical browsers most likely interpret b the same as strong, and i the same as em. And b is a helluvalot easier to type than strong. Vilify me if you want for not wanting to type 10 extra characters every time I want to highlight a sentence ... em is not as bad, I can use that more. But I don't see the point. --John
