On Oct 30, 2007, at 4:33 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
...
On Sun, 15 Jan 2006, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
...
Authors should use presentational markup whenever there is no
available semantic markup for the relevant meaning, or when they are
providing authoring facilities for people who cannot be expected to
think about semantic markup (e.g. people using Webmail, or people
posting comments on the author's Weblog). If authors -- or
specifications -- try too hard to use a semantic element, or to force
other people to use it, it will be misused so much that UAs can no
longer trust the element to have any particular meaning, so it will
become de facto presentational.
True... but it's not clear if elements like <font> and <center> are the
best way of addressing this.
Right, because there's no semantic element that their absence tempts
people to use instead. (Whereas omitting <b> and <i> would tempt people
to use <em> for italics and <strong> for bold instead.)
...
<i>
This has always been presentational, and will continue to be so in
the majority of HTML 5 documents. Most authors will assume it has
the same purpose as it did in previous versions of HTML; and many
of the authors who actually read that part of the spec will giggle
at the "instance of a term" frippery and disregard it.
This has changed since you commented on it, I believe. Now it's still
"presentational", but it is at least media-independent, being defined
in a way that is still usable in speech contexts.
Yes, the current definition makes much more sense, though it buries the
point a bit. I think it would be more obvious to begin something like
"The i element represents a span of text where the typical
typographical presentation is italics, and no other element is more
appropriate. (For example, citations should instead use the cite
element..."
...
(I strongly feel that there is a difference between <div> used for
grouping thematically related blocks, and <p> used for separating
thematically related inline content, e.g. parts of a form.
...
Launchpad.net presents (for people registered) many forms where a text
field has not just a label, but also an explanatory caption of one or
two (or in one case five) sentences. These captions are unambiguously
paragraphs <p>, inside form rows <div>, inside forms <form>. If we
wanted to "separat[e] thematically related ... parts of a form" we
wouldn't use <p>; we'd use <fieldset>, because that's *exactly* what
<fieldset> is for.
Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
