On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 9:38 AM, Pentasis <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pentasis@lavabit.com">pentasis@lavabit.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">Of course not. You're not intended to. What you *do* get, though, is that this is a word which is *intentionally* stylistically offset from the rest of the text. This conveys semantic meaning to a human - it means that the word is special or being used in a particular context. <b> and <i> don't communicate *much*, but they communicate *something*. One could, of course, also use a <span> to mark up and style the text, thus communicating the same intent to a person reading the styled text, but to a machine the <span> means literally nothing, while <b> and <i> have the possibility to communicate *something*.<br>
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In addition, the fact that these elements traditionally have a particular preferred rendering means something. A dumb terminal which doesn't understand CSS won't give any indication to the user that a <span> exists at all, while <b> and <i> have a chance of providing fallback rendering that still accomplishes what they were designed to do. A decent chunk of html5 concerns itself with providing fallbacks and graceful degradation (or progressive enhancement, whichever way you want to look at it). Having some *nearly* semantic-free elements which have a meaningful fallback can be useful.<br>
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Of course, it may certainly be more useful to you if you provide a class on the <i> as well.<br>
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~TJ<br>
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First: Computers are binary instruments. conveying *something* is not very logical seen from a computers point of view. It is not usefull to *me* to provide a class to the <i> or any other element, it is usefull to the computer, as humans may indeed come to some sort of conclusion based on style or strangely used semantics, computers cannot, they (still) need a more literal means of semantics.</blockquote>
<div><br>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.<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">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.<br>
</blockquote></div><br>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.<br>
<br>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?<br>
<br>~TJ<br>