[whatwg] <font>

[Sander Tekelenburg]

At 11:01 +1000 UTC, on 2007-05-02, Adrian Sutton wrote:

> On 2/5/07 1:28 AM, "Sander Tekelenburg" <st at isoc.nl> wrote:

[...]

>> can you explain exactly how span is much more difficult to work
>> with, and for whom?
>
> Quite a number of the cheap HTML to PDF conversion processes don't support
> CSS. Additionally, syndicated HTML (via Atom, RSS etc) tends to have inline
> CSS removed because of cross site scripting vulnerabilities (you can embed
> JavaScript in CSS and at least IE will execute it).

OK. Real world issues. But that doesn't mean that the HTML spec is the place
to fix those. Looks more like an opportunity for beter PDF generators to grab
market share and for IE to fix security bugs.

[...]

> Some people do restrict the editor to just applying
> predefined CSS classes and as a result they get a very consistent, easy to
> maintain site. Most however, prefer having the flexibility of a font menu so
> they can apply the specific font they won't precisely when they want it.

OK. Too bad. Still, I don't see why this would warrant making <font>
conforming.

> [...] People want the editor to look and
> work like Microsoft Word and Word has a font menu.

Right. Given that that is what they're used to that's understandable. However
"used to" implies that the same people could work with a more semantic
editor, if they'd be used to that. People get born every day without yet
being used to Word.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>