Andrew Cunningham skrev:
although i'd go further and say that browsers implementing italic as
default presentation for <em> and bold as default presentation for
<strong> are also wrong. Its attempting to make the typographic
conventions of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts universal when they aren't.
Its poor internationalization.
Not sure what you are saying here? A sigh over a bad decision in the
past or do you actually want to change the current default
implementation? Into what?
Yes, bold and italics for <strong> and <em> is Western centric, bit
having no default styling would make a lot of people very perplexed if
it changed now.
Most problems with default styling of <em> and <strong> seem solvable
with :lang (Not that all current browsers support it perfectly, though.)
<b> and <i> have no universal meaning. They have no universal
applicability. They are limited to certain typographic traditions and
certain scripts.
Agreed, but it is still a common use case to have people discussing in
English, German, French (or Swedish)! Should we remove the possibility
to do so. There are like a quadrizillion pages on Wikipedia in western
languages. Editors create bold text like '''this''' and italics like
''this''. 99 % are absolutely clueless about semantic HTML. Turning
'''this''' into <b>this</b> seem to be the least damaging way to handle
such editors.
> As the HTML 5 standards stands today, this is the view of the working
> group as well. The standard will provide some additional use cases where
> <b> and <i> perhaps should be considered the best (or least sucky)
> option available.
And what about cases where it should never be used?
Once again, the HTML 5 spec clearly discourages using <b> and <i> for
many uses where it has been used traditionally. I am not sure what you
are getting at. It does not encourage frivolous use of <b> or <i>.
using <b> and <i> implies that you have bold, italic and bold-italic
fonts to display the text with. On a standard Windows install for
instance, how many scripts actually do have such fonts compared to the
scripts that don't have these fonts?
In the western world I'd suppose 100 %... If I want a site in Swedish,
why should i not use a technology just because it would not work in
Japan? Perhaps you are not arguing against me, but is kind of feels like
you think I am encouraging arbitrary use of visual markup regardless of
context.
I'd add never use <b> and <i> when content needs to be internationalized.
Do not apply default presentation to semantic elements when content is
to be internationalized.
I'd use it as part of an applicable localization. Not as part of a
template that will or might be be translated into non western languages.
> * CMS software and an editor that can not access predefined classes
> should prefer <b> and <i> over inline styles.
Such a CMS and editor is poorly internationalized and has limited scope.
A lot of websites have limited scope. You will most probably never see
http://keryx.se translated into Japanese or Thai. So if I develop a CMS
for my own website, am I *required* to make it usable in any part of the
world? (OTOH, If I was working on ibm.com I'd have to think about it all
the time.)
In summary: I cant see that we actually disagree and I do think you have
valid points in bringing up I18N issues. Our non-western friends on this
list could perhaps chip in and provide additional wisdom.
Lars Gunther
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