Continuing today's flood of emails from me to this list, here's another.Note: I never bothered to read this thread the first time, but since Henri has brought to the top of my email client again, I started from the beginning.
I want to comment on the eight bullets given at: http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2003/xhtml2-cite.html (a page linked from Joe Clark's original article)These aren't that well thought through, I'm just throwing them out to be peed upon.
• 1 and 2 are both proper nouns, names of things.These could be addressed with <name> with predefined classes "book", "movie" and "ship" producing italic output (and "person", "animal", "product" etc not doing so) More thought would be needed here, like perhaps only applying for :lang(en) parent elements, such as: <html lang="en"><p>My favourite film is <name class="movie" lang="fr">Amelie</name>. I have it on <abbr>DVD</abbr>.</p></html>
• Bullets 3 to 6 could be addressed with a <term> element, default rendering italic (not related to <dt>). You can apply any adjective you want to term and it seems to remain valid: foreign term, mathematical term, new terminology, etc. It would seem quite versatile yet remain semantically useful without becoming too general.
• Bullet 7: I think people marking up computer code in HTML are completely wasting their time. Most sample code I have seen doesn't bother. e.g. some random OpenGL sample code:
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/Red_Rocket/listing4.html http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/lessons/lesson.asp?lesson=Mac_OS_XThe usage case for this vs. usage of HTML for the rest of the internet is insufficient to earn the right to be in HTML.
• Bullet 8: We already have <em> On 22 Mar 2007, at 21:25, Henri Sivonen wrote:
On Oct 30, 2006, at 22:33, Ian Hickson wrote:On Sun, 29 Oct 2006, Henri Sivonen wrote:FWIW, I think <samp> and <kbd> don't deserve to be in HTML and I am not convinced that the use cases for <var> could not be satisfied by <i>.I'm lukewarm on all three, but the cost to keeping these is probably slightly less than the cost to removing them, so I'm tending towardskeeping them... FWIW, <var> is used the most of those three, and <samp> the least; they are all three used more often than <bdo> or <ruby>, at least in the sample of several billion files I last made. (We're talkingin the 0.01% to 0.05% range here.)I tend to agree. But then they should not be used as a basis for arguing anything about the design of HTML5 or as bases for analogies for including new "semantic" elements of similar kind.
I hate them :-) I would love to see <var> <samp> <kbd> et al. officially deprecated.In fact, we could just deprecate anything that was in HTML 1.0 and hasn't earned itself more than 1% usage. No-one would miss them. (And if they do they can author in XML.)
I think elements should earn their place in the standard and get kicked out if the use case is too obscure or there is a more appropriate markup language available (MathML, DocBook).
I fear that in 100 years we'll be downloading free shampoo to our molecular synthesizers that will come wrapped in HTML <samp> tags.
- Nicholas.
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