On Jan 12, 2007, at 5:23 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
...
The introduction of <em> and <strong> (circa 1993) has failed to
achieve a semantic improvement over <i> and <b>, because prominent
tools such as Dreamweaver, Tidy, IE and Opera as well as simplified
well-intentioned advocacy treat <em> and <strong> merely as more
fashionable alternatives to <i> and <b>. (I mean failure in terms of
what meaning a markup consumer can extract from the real Web without a
private agreement with the producer of a given Web page. I don't mean
the ability of authors to write style sheets for their own markup.)
...
Is the effort to get people to use CSS instead of spacer GIFs a bad
idea?
Is the effort to get people to use <h1>..<h6> instead of <p><b> or
<p><font> a bad idea?
Is the effort to get people to use CSS instead of <table> for layout a
bad idea?
There were, I'm sure, many more occurrences of those problems than
there were improper uses of <em> and <strong>. And the efforts to
replace them are much older than the effort to get people who don't
think about semantics to use <b> and <i>, which has hardly even started
yet.
Ten years ago, the typical Web developer probably didn't know what <em>
and <strong> were. Now, the typical Web developer probably thinks that
<b> and <i> are dirty and that XHTML is the future. This does not mean
all is lost, it just means the standards advocates oversteered. Time
for another adjustment.
...
Insisting on the difference of <i> and <em> is not without harm,
because arguing about which one to use is not without opportunity
cost.
...
"Not without" makes that statement look more profound than it is.
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
