Ian Hickson schrieb:
On Thu, 4 Jun 2009, Andrew W. Hagen wrote:
Encouraging use of small print for legalese also encourages this:
<h1>
<a href="continue.html">
Welcome to the BigCo web site. Click to continue.
</a>
</h1>
<small>By clicking above, you agree that BigCo can charge your
credit card $10 per visit to the BigCo web site per page clicked.</small>
Right, that's the case we do want to encourage. It's better than the
alternative, which would be:
<style>
.s { font-size: smaller; }
</style>
<h1>
<a href="continue.html">
Welcome to the BigCo web site. Click to continue.
</a>
</h1>
<span class=s>By clicking above, you agree that BigCo can charge your
credit card $10 per visit to the BigCo web site per page clicked.</span>
...because if they use <small>, you can configure your client to go out of
its way to highlight <small> text, whereas you have no way to know to
highlight any text based on its font size or class.
Anyway that does not prevent the BigCos from using <span> or <p> or
<div>, if they really want to style their fraudulent text the way it is
hard to read. The more user agents will be set to display the <small>
element big, the less this element will be used by those who are
actually addressed by this encouragement.
Instead of keeping a purely presentational category such as "small" as
an HTML element, would it not be more efficient to use some kind of
<legal> element? User agents then could be configured to ignore small
text sizes or badly visible colors on <legal> elements. Also, other ways
to bar people from reading legal text, such as setting it in uppercase
characters, could be handled - which does not seem appropriate for a
<small> element.
And countries willing to protect their people from fraud could establish
a law that any text on a website is only legally binding when it is
marked up with the <legal> element.
--
Markus
