[whatwg] contenteditable, <em> and <strong>

[Henri Sivonen]

On Jan 10, 2007, at 14:40, Simon Pieters wrote:

> From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at iki.fi>
>> Two of the four implementations that the WHATWG cares about   
>> interoperate. Is it worthwhile to disrupt that  
>> situation&#8212;especially  considering that changes to Trident  
>> are the hardest for the WHATWG to  induce?
>
> Does the interoperability matter much in this case?

If I was writing a cross-browser CMS with a contenteditable-based  
editor, I'd be seriously unhappy about what WebKit does. The  
differences between what IE, Opera and Firefox produce can be dealt  
with relatively easily, but it would still be uncool to have to deal  
with them. So, yes, interop would be desirable.

> Well... in that case <strong> needs to be defined as being  
> equivalent to <b> and <em> equivalent to <i>, and the ability to  
> mark things as being important or as stress emphasis is lost.

My point is that if the consumer of the markup cannot make practical  
use of the distinction, making the distinction on the producer side  
becomes pointless to the extent the production of markup is about  
communication with a consuming party. The ability of the producer to  
use whatever private distinction him/herself for styling wouldn't be  
affected.

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