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

[Henri Sivonen]

On Mar 23, 2007, at 02:04, Christoph Päper wrote:

>>> (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?

Perhaps, but it is still the common case, because the bicameral  
scripts form the vast majority of Web content[1]. Just because  
something doesn't apply to *all* scripts doesn't make it irrelevant  
as far as optimizing for the common case goes.

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

I think fighting the B and I buttons is futile, but I defer to the  
authoring tool vendors on this list.

[1] According to http://macchiato.com/slides/unicode_at_google.pdf,  
the Latin script is used many times more often than all other scripts  
taken together. Of the rest, Han is used slightly more than Cyrillic,  
but Cyrillic is used more than everything else that is left after  
Latin and Han.

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