[whatwg] The m element

[Charles McCathieNevile]

On Wed, 07 Feb 2007 01:25:37 +0530, Alexey Feldgendler <alexey at feldgendler.ru> 
wrote:

> On Tue, 06 Feb 2007 09:13:27 +0100, Mikko Rantalainen <mikko.rantalainen at peda.net>
> wrote:
>
>> Perhaps <m> should be considered as a special case of <em>. I would have
>> to agree that semantic value of <m> over <em> is next to meaningless. I
>> think that one usable definition between <m> and <em> would be that <m>
>> is meant for highlighting content for a single user and <em> is meant
>> for emphasizing stuff in general. That would limit usage of <m> to
>> dynamically generated content only, though, and reserving such a short
>> tag for that purpose only doesn't seem reasonable.
>
> IMO, the key difference between <m> and <em> is that <m> is intended to be
> placed by somebody or something other than the author of the original text.

HTML doesn't really imply that an original author or later editor decided on 
what markup to use.

> Highlighting search hits is one of the examples (the hits are marked by the
> search engine, not by the author of the text). Another example can be quoting
> someone and using <m> to mark the words of particular importance — not in the
> cited author's opinion, but rather in the context where the quote appears.
>
> Example:
>
> <p>Another example is this sentence: <q>Hard <m>labour</m> has turned monkeys
> into human beings.</q> Note the use of British spelling.</p>
>
> Using <em> in this example wouldn't be appropriate because it would imply that 
“labour”
> is the most important word in the sentence.

No, it just implies that in the context of this page as delivered, the word is 
emphasised for some reason (which you have to guess from context unless you are 
going with RDFa or some microformat or something).

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
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