Without trying to drag this on Ben...
Indeed. I suspect this discussion is one of those that a lot of
people would be in agreement if they were in the same room, but in
email it seems like there may be more disagreement than intended.
Tends to produce many emails, especially from folks like me who find
themselves arguing a point they aren't fully behind...
If backward compatibility is the only argument
then it only goes slightly further back than SPAN
...
Non-backwards compatibility of the B tag is screen rendered bold
text which
may not be the purpose of the class hook, now, or in the future.
SPAN is
neutral which is what we want.
The original poster was trying to highlight certain text. He
suggested the b tag but worried that it was deprecated. My response
was that it is not deprecated, would provide the highlight he wanted
in non-CSS browsers, and as valid XHTML1.1 it would also be as
forward-compatible as any other option (because my contention is that
for any XHTML 1.0 or 1.1 document to become XHTML 2.0, it must be
translated, perhaps with XSLT). I was not advocating the b tag over
the span tag, but merely pointing that it is a valid option. Whether
it is the correct option is debatable.
So the compatibility thing is not that span was introduced later, but
that b would produce the desired effect when a browser is incapable
of rendering the CSS. This is not necessarily about non-CSS browsers
(e.g., Netscape 3, Lynx), because a popular technique for handling
browsers with poor market share is to deliver no CSS to them. People
are discussing whether this should be done with IE5 (Win and Mac),
which certainly could render a span as bold but might not be given
the chance.
Time for a cold one I think... ;)
A brilliant idea. Always up for a cool pint. Lemme finish breakfast
first. :)
--
Ben Curtis : webwright
bivia : a personal web studio
http://www.bivia.com
v: (818) 507-6613
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