On Thursday, January 14, 2010 6:36:50 pm Rick Duley wrote:
> I am using HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS 2.1. <u></u> has been exiled and I
> cannot understand why.
>
> I use APA document referencing style and I am frequently required (yes,
> required, ... by the style) to underline fields in a bibliographic
> reference. I find that <span style="text-decoration:
> underline">Field</span> is a clumsy substitute.
>
> Why was <u></u> sent to Coventry?
>
The idea is that you would not write <span style="text-decoration:
underline">title</span> over and over but that instead you would define a
class and do it.
Something like:
<head>...
<style>
.title {text-decoration: underline}
</style>
</head>
<body>...
<span class="title">Title</span>
...
</body>
The point being that HTML is a language used to describe the document. The
fact that the title of the source is underlined is not the important part.
That does not describe the document at all. The important part is that the
title of the source is a title, hence the class name.
To be even more semantically correct, each bibliographic entry should probably
go inside <cite> tags (which you would then have to remove the default italic
style on). But it would also allow you to do other convenient things, like
automatically have all the entries indented (or outdented - i forget how APA
works) correctly, without having to resort to extra spaces and <br/> tags.
How far you decide to go in semantic description is kind of subjective, and of
course, you can ignore it completely, as Felix pointed out. (I am a strong
proponent of semantic markup, so I personally do not recommend this route, but
I do admit that it exists.)
---Tim
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