Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
End of the day: if you're really after showing a visual style even if
CSS is unavailable or disabled, heck, stick with presentational markup
and use <i> then, and don't abuse <em> where it's not appropriate.
Call me sad, but I love these conversations.
As far as I'm concerned, <i> and <b> were mistakes in the present
hindsight of HTML's grand design. The idea that I'm going to be looking
through your DOM and find... A body, containing a div, containing a
paragraph, containing text, and... A bold? An italic? Suddenly you've
destroyed the notion of self-defining abstract nodes independent of medium.
i < em
b < strong
Emphasis and strong emphasis are far stronger and more independent
concepts, and have that sought-after advantage of creating the same
visual effects by default, without recourse to CSS. If your top priority
is making your text italic no matter what, use <em>.
However, in the case of describing the species, you aren't really
emphasising it - you want to differentiate this text from the
surroundings, but not as an emphasised portion of flowing prose. In fact
what makes it different from the rest of the text (it describes a
species) is not a fundamental difference in type of information, in fact
it's very specific. So as such there is no shame in confining it to
something as pedestrian as a classed and styled <span>.
There is not really a middle ground in my mind (for this particular
example) - if you are adamant about visual user agents without CSS
displaying this item in italic, use <i> or <em>, but realise that you're
compromising substance for style.
I'm not of the opinion that that would be a cardinal sin, it just
depends on how dearly you value semantics. There is this notion that
higher powers will punish you. They won't. Our Lord Google who art in
heaven does not, contrary to the teachings of some, analyse the names of
your classes or content of your text nodes and then rate it on arbitrary
strength of meaning. It takes a human to make that kind of judgment -
and that person is you.
Regards,
Barney
*******************************************************************
List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm
Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*******************************************************************
