4 ms·
This is quite annoying. There is a lot of web-pages that use <i> to mean "italic"; possibly most of them. Many of those are not going to be updated just because
by denton-scratch 4y ago
This is quite annoying. There is a lot of web-pages that use <i> to mean "italic"; possibly most of them. Many of those are not going to be updated just because of a change in the definition of the tag.
Instead, they should have introduced a new tag, e.g. <idiomatic>, while deprecating <i>.
Most internet standards are descriptive, not coercive. The semantic web's advocates have been coercive from the beginning, but despite the repeated failures of coercion, they keep on at it.
What does "idiomatic" mean anyway? If I say that idiomatic markup is a waste of time, do I have to put "waste of time" in an <idiomatic> element? How is text in "another language" idiomatic text? [Checks for another example] Oh, that's the only example they give of something that's "idiomatic".
It seems clear to me that "idiomatic" isn't what they mean at all; what they mean is some text fragment that should appear differently, because in some way the "mode of speech" is to be treated differently. It looks as if they've hijacked the <i> tag because they want it to stop meaning what it means; they've chosen a meaning that starts with the letter "i" for that reason.
The way I parse it, "idiomatic" text is any kind of text that would normally be set apart by being presented in italic. That is, it's not even semantic markup at all; it's a politically-correct gesture to the semantic markup die-hards.
- mysterydip 4y agoNext up: "<b> is for... beneficial text."
- unsafecast 4y agoIt's actually for "bring attention to" :) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/b https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/b
- capableweb 4y agoNot to be confused with "<strong>: The Strong Importance element"
- Garlef 4y agoAlso not to be confused with "<mark>" to indicate relevance. A use case might be if the respective part of the text is of strong relevance and you want to bring attention to it by emphasizing it. But now I'm unsure if I should consider these distinctions <bullshit> or <horsecrap>?
- denton-scratch 4y agoThing is, when you're composing prose in your native language, you don't generally parse it and re-parse it to figure out whether some term is "relevant", or requiring attention, or in an "alternative mood". A native speaker/writer isn't normally aware of the grammatical aspect of what they write; they know how they want the text to appear. Trying to force writers to instead overlay a layer of meta-meaning on their prose, so that the meaning is expressed both in the text and the markup, is a fool's errand. It's a bit like a programming system that requires the developer to express his meaning in both Forth and Python; it's just asking for an author to write text that directly contradicts the markup.
- denton-scratch 4y agoSo that's 'b' for 'bring'. But you could bring anything, couldn't you? E.g. "Party tonite; <b>your own bottle</b>". It's a stretch.
- moritzwarhier 4y ago> Do not confuse the <b> element with the <strong>, <em>, or <mark> elements. The <strong> element represents text of certain importance, <em> puts some emphasis on the text and the <mark> element represents text of certain relevance. The <b> element doesn't convey such special semantic information; use it only when no others fit. This is really hard to take seriously, even as someone who advocates for semantic HTML. Surely all these nuances mean something tangible, but I don't see it. Compared to <b> vs <strong> vs <em>, <mark> and <i> seem comparatively sensible.
- unsafecast 4y agoI agree. I like the idea of semantic HTML with close to no classes, but the standard is really failing here. I generally just use <em>, and very rarely <strong>.
- chrismorgan 4y agoFret not. The term “idiomatic” is just MDN’s editorialised and poorly-chosen title for the underlying element, heavily incomplete and simplified past the point of conveying the meaning at all. They should have given up on choosing a single word for it (like they haven’t tried with <s>). The actual spec describes it much more reasonably: > The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, transliteration, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts.