Hi guys, my first post, :> Patrick, while I largely agree with the whole separating content from presentation argument (I try as best I can to adhere to XHTML 1.1 whenever I can) I do find the case for the <i> tag compelling. Mainly this is because it all comes down to the fact that you are simply marking up a section of text as being italicised. It's far better than writing out something like <font blah blah blah> as one would have done in the bad, bad, BAD old days, and to my mind it's more desirable than writing <span class="senior_synonym"> which takes up 28 more characters than it needs to. (X)HTML is a *markup* language so marking it up as italicised is fulfilling the function of that language. Just my two cents.
I thankee, Iain -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Patrick Griffiths Sent: 06 May 2004 18:03 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [WSG] When the mix of visual appearance and meaning goes really bad > Absolutely! In natural science (specifically speaking about species names > here) Italics are the way to present the scientific name (genus species pair > or "senior synonym" like <i>Thorunna australis</i> or even just the species > or shorthand variations), not "emphasis". I think there is a good argument > for using <i> here as it isn't ambiguous in any way that I want italics. In > this case <em> is just semantically wrong and <i> simply should not be > deprecated. Hmm. This is a difficult one. I think it could be argued that this is emphasis. In this case you are emphasising the species by displaying it in italics. <i> certainly isn't the way to go though with either argument - language is supposed to be independent of presentation, be it visual or aural or whatever. What if the biologists that be decided to change the way this was normally presented? What if it was deemed to be better to be in bold rather than italics? Your HTML would then be semantically incorrect. Hypothetical, but logical. I think it's right to completely separate meaning and presentation and I think it's right to deprecate i. ---------------- Patrick Griffiths (PTG) http://www.htmldog.com/ptg/ http://www.htmldog.com ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ***************************************************** ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
