[whatwg] [web-apps] 2.7.8 The i element

[Henri Sivonen]

On Apr 16, 2005, at 16:04, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Sat, 16 Apr 2005, Rob Mientjes wrote:
>>>
>>> Is there any advantage to marking up people's names?
>>
>> I dunno. I was just trying to fill the gap of need ;)
>
> The question is: is the need a real need or a perceived need?

Some print newspapers and magazines bold the first occurrence (per 
article) of each personal name. (Is it actually useful? Dunno.) 
However, doing this with a style sheet once each name has been marked 
up as such would be really hard compared to just using <b> where the 
editor wants it. UAs are not going to be able to perform morphological 
analysis for every language under the sun and, therefore, will the 
unable to figure out that <name lang='fi'>Sivonen</name> and <name 
lang='fi'>Sivosen</name> are occurrences of the same name but the 
latter occurrence is in genetive.

An AI-complete UA would need no name markup anyway. :-)

 From time to time, I am doubting the usefulness of avoiding of <b> and 
<i> on principle, when it is, after all, bold and italic that is wanted 
and not some generic change of appearance.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/