[thelist] semantic markup

[Diane Soini]

Sorry I started this. My intention was really to question whether the 
structure of prose documents, which is what most of the semantic markup 
is for, actually fits the concept and structures of user interface 
elements, but oh well.

I am wondering, however, what is there out there that actually only 
reads a web page in its strictest semantic form? And how exactly would 
it stumble over a <b> tag as opposed to an <em> tag. I would like to 
try this thing out and run some tests.

Oh, and I think it is sort of strange that in the print world, fonts 
themselves have bold and italic faces, but not strong and emphasis 
faces. On some browsers if you use <b> or <i> you get the actual bold 
or italic version of the font, not just a chunky or slanty version of 
the plain font. In print, that would matter.

Diane

On Wednesday, June 2, 2004, at 09:02 AM, 
thelist-request at lists.evolt.org wrote:
>
> Tim Beadle said:
>
>> They don't cover all situations. If what you want is
>> emphasis, or strong emphasis, then fine - use them. What you
>> shouldn't do, though, is wholesale replace all <i> tags with
>> <em>, and <b> with <strong>, as there are many different
>> semantic meanings for bold text and italics, which are not emphasis.
>
> The whole point of <em> and <strong> is to move away from the
> semantically meaningless, visually meaningful tags <b> and <i>. It's an
> accessibility issue, and part of the reason why <b> and <i> are
> deprecated tags in HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0.
>
***
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