[whatwg] Deprecating <small>, <b> ?

[Pentasis]

>>>If we wish to communicate that level of semantics, yes.  It may not be useful to us.  If you *really* need some metadata/semantics, @class probably can't convey it with enough granularity.  Check out the big discussion from a few months ago about ccRel and RDFa.
 

Not yet maybe, but we could at least try to keep options open for the future.


>>Second: Suppose I want to collect all copyright notices from 1000 websites (don't ask me why, I just want to), how am I to do this when they are marked up in <small>s? I will definatly end up with a lot of text that has nothing to do with copyrights (and probably miss a lot of copyright notices as they are marked up differently) Whereas If they were maked up in (for example) <span class="copyright"> I could retrieve it all based on the class-name.

>>>That would be a wonderful perfect world.  I'd like the copyright date as well, so I can retrieve only things copyrighted in the last ten years.  Assuming that metadata will exist is a fool's errand.  The fact is that if you are searching for copyright notices, the most efficient way is likely to just search for the string "copyright" and the (c) symbol.  That'll net you copyright notices with a high accuracy, and some training on real data can yield further rules to improve the data-mining accuracy.

You say it yourself, only in a perfect world where all websites in the world would be written in the same language would your "solution" work. Unfortunatly I would miss out on all the chinese copyright stuff.
But another example (based on "siemens") wouldn't it be nice if I could tell Google I am looking for a person named "Siemens" so it would ignore the "brand"-name?


>>>While we're hoping for copyright notices to be marked up as <span class="copyright">, though, why not wish for <small class="copyright">?  If you're going to be providing metadata, it works the same.  Is it that you believe people won't provide a special class for copyrights if the <small> tag already gives them the preferred display?  Do you believe that everyone will automatically use class="copyright" to mark up their copyright notices?  What if they use class="copyright-notice"?  Or class="license"?  Or any of a million other distinct possibilities that would destroy any naive attempt to datamine based on a particular class name?


Well, that would have to be defined in the standard, wouldn't it? I'm not saying -again- it should be defined NOW, but at least leave the door open.
I have no problems with using small over span, neither one is correct as far as I can see, in this context. Using "copyright" instead of "license" or "copyright-notice" would have to be defined somewhere, either in the standard or in an externally maintained "document" that is accepted as "best practice" or "standards related".

PS: I find it very difficult to respond to rich-text/html messages as they seriously mess up the indentation. Sorry therfor if this message is unclear as original message and reply are mixed up.
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