[whatwg] Semantics and related feedback

[Ian Hickson]

On Sun, 28 Dec 2008, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
>
> On 28/12/08 04:09, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > I agree that conventions differ between media, but if the author wants to
> > tweak the settings for each media, CSS and class values already exist to
> > take care of this.
> 
> That's true for authors only (the party least likely to want to tweak 
> settings for other media and most likely to get them wrong). It's not 
> true for default user agent stylesheets, it's not true for user 
> stylesheets, and it's not true for user interfaces for controlling 
> presentation.
> 
> Realistically, I think one either has to say these differing conventions 
> are not important enough to be represented on the web or that "i" 
> doesn't actually deliver media independence on this front. "i" plus 
> microformats might.

I believe I did say later in that e-mail (though maybe in not so many 
words) that there was no point trying to provide semantics as fine-grained 
as would be necessary to handle all these cases of media-specific 
conventions, because authors are unlikely to have the patience to actually 
use such markup correctly anyway.

We already see people using <em> for things other than emphasis; I don't 
think providing even more fine-grained semantics would really help here.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'