On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 2:53 AM, Ian Hickson <i...@hixie.ch> wrote: >> That might be realistic, especially there is no significant semantic >> clarification in sight in general. This raises the question why we could >> not just return to the original design with some physical markup like >> <i>, <b>, and <u> together with <span> that was added later. > > I think you'll find the "original design" of HTML isn't what you think it > is (or at least, it's certainly not as presentational as you imply above), > but that's neither here nor there.
Is there a record of design between http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Tags.html and http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt ? >> So why not simply define <i> recommended and describe <var>, <cite>, >> <em>, and <dfn> as deprecated but supported alternatives? > > What benefit does empty deprecation have? It's not like we can ever remove > these elements altogether. What harm do they cause? The harm is the wasted time spent worrying about and debating which "semantic" alternative for italics to use. > If we have to keep them, we are better served by embracing them and giving > them renewed purpose and vigour, rather than being ashamed of them. I think we have to keep them, because trying to declare them invalid would cause people to do a lot of pointless work, too, but I think we could still be ashamed of them. > Note that as it is specified, <div> can be used instead of <p> with > basically no loss of semantics. (This is because the spec defines > "paragraph" in a way that doesn't depend on <p>.) Is there any known example of a piece of software that needs to care about the concept of "paragraph" and uses the rules given in the spec for determining what constituted "paragraphs"? -- Henri Sivonen hsivo...@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/