[whatwg] Use cases for style= on arbitrary elements

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

> We have a set of things, stored in a database and listed on a Web page, 
> where we want to indicate their age by making the older ones "fade 
> away". This would be done by computing a shade of grey, and putting it 
> in a style= attribute for the <li> element.

This sounds more like a use-case for nested <em> to me.

> A more common example is tag clouds, where a computed size is given in 
> the style= attribute of an <a> element. In that case, there is the same 
> objection to using classes. And there is a more practical objection to 
> using <font>: in a cloud that showed hundreds of tags, an extra element 
> for each of them would add substantially to the size of the page.

This not only sounds like a use-case for nested <em>, but it is
apparently an /actual/ use of nested <em> (by Technorati):

http://24ways.org/2006/marking-up-a-tag-cloud

(And compare the more explicit approach advocated there.)

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis