On 18 Jul 2002, it is alleged that John Keiser sauntered in to netscape.public.mozilla.documentation and loudly proclaimed:
> > > fantasai wrote: >> Brian Heinrich wrote: >> >>>On 11 Jul 2002, it is alleged that fantasai sauntered in to >>>netscape.public.mozilla.documentation and loudly proclaimed: >> >> ... >> >> All good points, of course. I would hardly say "loudly proclaimed", >> though, since I did slip almost all of that in with an example I >> originally wrote up to demonstrate the use of class="para" in the >> Markup Guide. :) I don't claim any expertise in technical >> documentation; this bit of text you're tearing apart is just my >> reaction to some of the online documentation I've had to read. As for >> lists, you might want to re-read the actual text of my message and then >> compare the rendered result of the example with what would be the text >> if I had forced that list into paragraph form. >> >> >>>Most often, yes. There are various ways in which to go about this. >>>(BTW, fantasai, this is part of my problem with structural/semantic >>>tags: there are time I want to highlight information in a purely >>>physical/presentational way, and often the rationale for doing so is >>>simply to give a bit of guidance to a reader who might just be skimming >>>the text.) >> >> >> But using <b> to do so will not help anyone without a graphical >> browser. At least if you declare your intent--which is to highlight the >> information--someone can write the necessary style rules for devices >> with other capabilities. > > But that's the intent with b and i. Highlighting is presentational. > The fact that non-graphical browsers highlight things differently just > means they have a different presentation. That's what I've been arguing for quite a while, since there are times when it just seems over-kill to impose a semantic, content-based 'meaning' on something when all you want to do is presentationally highlight it. > Non-graphical browsers most likely interpret b the same as strong, and i > the same as em. One would hope so. > And b is a helluvalot easier to type than strong. Vilify me if you want > for not wanting to type 10 extra characters every time I want to > highlight a sentence ... em is not as bad, I can use that more. But I > don't see the point. Nor do I. Then again, I fail to see the point of /not/ including <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">. Ever try to get a page to validate properly w/o defining a charset attribute? /b. > --John
