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

[Henri Sivonen]

On Apr 18, 2005, at 17:31, Mikko Rantalainen wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> On Apr 16, 2005, at 16:04, Ian Hickson wrote:
>>> 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.) [...]
>>  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.
>
> I think that "bold" isn't really what magazines are looking for in 
> your example case.

Have you ever seen any other emphasis than bold in that case?

> It's more like some kind of emphasize on first occurrence of person's 
> name. I'd rather use <em>, somebody else might use <strong>.

I do not believe the meaning of the bolding is strong emphasis in this 
case. Emphasis perhaps but not particularly strong.

> I still think that <b> isn't correct element to use in this case. 
> Newspapers use bold just because it's *the* method  to emphasize text 
> in that world.

When there are established cases where you are supposed to use bold and 
cases where you are supposed to use italic, is it truly useful to try 
to enumerate all the semantic roles and come up with gazillions of 
synonyms for <b> and <i> only in order to adhere to the "no 
presentationalism" principle even when there aren't compelling use 
cases for programmatic text analysis that would benefit from 
fine-grained semantics?

Is anyone here seriously expecting Google to come up with a service 
that harvested the names of ships if What WG specified a semantic 
element for marking up the names of ships?

> A web browser can do more.

For example?

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