2014-02-16 20:52, John Johnson skrev:
is <span> any more semantic that <b>, <i>, <em>, or <strong> ?
I am not a CSS wizard (yet) but I love that <span> is available, and I use it
instead of the others, which are basically inline styles, the greater sin, are they
not?
I do not visualize how items within, say, divs, can be differentiated, when need be,
without <span>
Surely <em> and <strong> are not presentational but semantic?
They don't say "render this so-and-so" but "this is important"
and "this is even more important/very important". It's not their
semantics' fault that all browsers/people render them as italics
and bold respectively; they could in principle be rendered in
any two ways which make them stand out from ordinary text. To me
it smacks of self decception that people use
<strong><em>foo</em></strong> when they really think "bold
italics". There should rather be a <stronger> element! I make a
point of using <em> or <strong> with different classes showing
the reason for the emphasis. If OTOH I just need something to
hang a lang attribute on I use <span> -- in fact I use <span> as
a peg for purely presentational stuff like font changes more
than anything else, but even those tend to be varieties of
emphasis anyway.
I see now that the spec says "stress emphasis" which sounds
tautological and if taken literally would be presentational
markup for a phonetic feature -- voice renderers beware -- but
then they should by rights introduce a <stress> element and
promptly deprecate it as presentational! :-) Why single out
just one kind of emphasis?
But hey I'm probably deceiving myself just wanting a resonable
fallback rendering as italics anyway; it's questionable whether
it's natural for people to think of semantics decoupled from how
it's signalled, but now I'm just a former linguist splitting
semantic hairs, I'm afraid. I daresay I know more about semantics
than those spec writers!
/bpj
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