[whatwg] Joe Clark's Criticisms of the WHATWG and HTML 5

[Christoph Päper]

Henri Sivonen:
> On Oct 30, 2006, at 22:33, Ian Hickson wrote:
>> The CSS community has requested a <date> or <time>
>> element because they want to restyle dates and times according to  
>> locale.

Then the recent request to www-style for styling numbers would be  
justified as well. An element for times (or numbers) could have other  
uses, though.

>> One of the reasons for keeping <var>, <cite>, <em>, etc, separate,  
>> instead
>> of saying that authors should just use <i> for all of them, is  
>> that it
>> makes styling them differently much easier.
>
> Assuming, of course, that you want to style them differently  
> instead of just italicizing all of them.
>> (Why is <i class="var"> better than <var>?)
>
> It isn't. But <i> is better than <var> for editor UIs if all you  
> want to do is to italicize (the common case).

Isn't this a very western point of view?

PS: (Hyper)Text editors should never have had B, I and U buttons in  
the first place, but now it is an established concept.