Bjartur Thorlacius wrote:
Þann þri 2.ágú 2011 09:04, skrifaði Henri Sivonen:
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From time to time, people want to take printed matter an publish it on the Web. In practice, the formats available are PDF and HTML. HTML works more nicely in browsers and for practical purposes works generally better when the person taking printed matter to the Web decides that the exact line breaks and the exact font aren't of importance. They may still consider it of importance to preserve bold, italic and underline
[...]
So you're arguing that a subset of HTML should be favored over presentational markup languages for marking up digital retypes of printed matter, with <b>, <i>, <u>, <font>, <small> and <big> be redefined to their HTML 3 typographical meanings.
I can't speak for Henri, but agree with his point quoted above. There are of course other options as well, such as images and word processor file formats, but they have the same problem as PDF: they preserve too much of the formatting.
Please note that this isn't about favoring HTML over presentational markup languages; none of the alternatives mentioned is a markup language at all. HTML has always been a presentational markup language, too, and HTML as officially defined (HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0) still has presentational features, so the question is whether they should be taken away, not about "redefining" them. It is the WHATWG & HTML5 work that is proposing a redefinition. (I say "proposing", since from the viewpoint of implementor, author, and user communities as well as the W3C, they are proposals, not a standard. In many parts of HTML, the proposal has widely been or is being accepted in practice, but I see little signs of such things happening with the new meanings for <b> and friends.)
And perhaps <blockquote> standardized to mean indent.
I wouldn't object to that, but _that_ would mean a change to the tradition of HTML specifications, and although <blockquote> mostly means "indent", it fairly often means a block quotation. Moreover, the situations where an HTML author needs to say "this text is indented in the printed original" without presenting any fixed interpretation of the intended meaning of indentation appear to be rather rare, as compared with situations where one needs to say e.g. "this text appears in italics in the printed original".
If you simply retype print without any interpretation of the typography used, a valid speech rendering would e.g. cue bold text with "bold" and "unbold" marks to convey the meaning: this text was bold.
It could, and that would actually reflect the authors intentions: he wishes to convey the idea of bolding, leaving it to the reader to infer or guess the meaning of bolding. (At the extreme, you might have a page that discusses a printed document in general and the use of bolding in it in particular, and then it is surely relevant to indicate the bolding - as "pure bolding".) In practice, speech rendering doesn't behave that way, but even if it did, it would constitute an argument in favor of the typographic markup, not against it.
If all you want is to suggest original typographic rendering, then (save for Excerpt/Blockquote, Nofill/Pre and Lang/@lang) CSS does the job, better - and is vastly more powerful.
This isn't about suggesting, this is about reproducing aspects of printed material that may be essential. It is comparable to making a distinction between lowercase and uppercase, which may be purely presentational or may carry essential information. The case distinction can be made by the simple choice of letters at the character level, or it may be delegated to CSS if it is regarded as purely presentational. For bolding etc., the character-level alternative does not exist or it is highly impractical (and e.g. mathematical italics letters are, in addition to being present in a few fonts only, intended for mathematical use rather than common use of italics). So all I'm asking is to preserve the existing features of HTML or, more exactly, preserve them without declaring them as obsolete.
Yucca
