[whatwg] [web-apps] 2.7.8 The i element
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
Sat Apr 16 07:53:14 PDT 2005
On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> >
> > Actually, <i> in HTML5 is currently defined as having specific
> > semantics:
> >
> > http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-i
>
> So does "i" now stand for "instance", instead of "italics"?
At least until someone argues otherwise. :-) This is actually something
that was first suggested back in 1997:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1997Dec/0064.html
> > > My favourite book is <a href="urn:isbn:0-735-71245-X">Eric Meyer on
> > > CSS</a>.
> >
> > What if there is no appropriate link, though?
>
> I don't know.
That's the problem. Would abusing <cite> for this be acceptable? Do we
need another element?
> > Or when I can't be bothered to find out what the link is?
>
> Then you're just being lazy :-)
Like most HTML authors.
> > Also, there's nothing that distinguishes that <a> from other <a>
> > elements,
>
> Sure there is:
> a[href^=urn:isbn:] { /* Styles for book titles */ }
>
> Although, that would depend on every book being linked with an ISBN URI, if
> they were all to recieve the same styles.
I don't particularly plan on ever linking to a urn:, since the likelihood
of their being successfully dereferenced is extremely low. I don't think
that's really a workable solution.
> > yet there is something very different about that one -- it's the title
> > of another work. I'd like to be able to style all such titles
> > consistently, so they have to be marked up in some way.
>
> In that case, would you want to differentiate between ordinary titles
> and real citations? Or is that something that the class attribute could
> handle, if needed?
I don't know. What do people think?
> > Movie titles are similar. I'd like my UA to give me a tooltip
> > containing information from IMDB for every movie title. With user
> > JavaScript I can do this, if there's a way to recognise movie titles.
>
> Then would you want different markup for book titles, movie titles, play
> titles, song titles, etc? Or would you just expect the script to search
> IMDB for anything marked up with <cite>?
Again, I don't really know. I could see a use case for a "type" attribute
(as was suggested earlier in this thread), but that seems like a slippery
slope. Suggestions?
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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