Ben Buchanan wrote:
So in my culture at least, <small> sort of does what you want. But I have no idea at all if the "smaller text" paradigm translates in the slightest for other cultures. So it's just a tad weak, semantically speaking :)
it doesn't.And for some writing scripts, unless the end user has changed their browser preferences, small may end up being difficult to read at best or at worst illegible.
Although the issue with using the <small> element would be whether the size of text is a way of de-emphasising something or whether its purely a presentational style.
I suspect the tradition of typesetting of fine print owes more to trying to fit long legal text into a fixed or limited space (and maybe making it less readable, if you want to be suspicious) that to a systematic method of differentiating it from other text.
From my perspective the <small> element is not semantic. It is purely presentational. To make <small> semantic would mean that you'd have to divorce the semantic function from the presentational function (size of text) for web internationalization purposes. Forcing certain typographic traditions on all languages is a bad approach.
I have enough trouble with people assuming emphasised text is always visually rendered in an italic typeface, and that strongly emphasised text is always visually rendered in a bold weight, without throwing in <small> into the mix.
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