3 ms·

> Some sites rely on the <u> element giving the presentational effect of an underline. > The b and i elements are widely used — it is better to give them good

> Some sites rely on the <u> element giving the presentational effect of an underline. > The b and i elements are widely used — it is better to give them good default rendering for various media including aural than to try to ban them. “Some sites”… “widely used”… yeah, because that’s the purpose of those tags. To underline, bold, italic, respectively. This isn’t some concession we should be giving to legacy user agents, it’s the whole original stated purpose of the tags. Any attempt to retcon them to mean other stuff in the name of (something something) “media independence” or some such academic nonsense, is totally backwards. I know that large parts of this article agree with me, but I still get angry that HTML took this purist direction to make huge swaths of markup useless in the name of semantic/display split that no user actually asked for. When I first read about the em tag and how it is the new way to do what the i tag used to do, I knew the whole thing had already been driven off a cliff.

deleted 3y ago
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ezequiel-garzon 3y ago
The puzzling aspect is that, contrary to what most people would assume, the B, I, EM and STRONG elements all came out under the same version (2.0) of HTML: https://meiert.com/en/indices/html-elements/ https://meiert.com/en/indices/html-elements/
- bensecure 3y ago
  > https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_toc.html#SEC5.7 https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_toc.html#SEC5.... > Phrases may be marked up according to idiomatic usage, typographic appearance, or for use as hyperlink anchors. So the original standard considered both approaches valid, later standards decided that typographic usage was invalid.
  - red_trumpet 3y ago
    No, there is a clear distinction between typographic and idiomatic markup. The i and b elements are considered typographic elements, not idiomatic ones (as em). So newer standards actually made them idiomatic.

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ezequiel-garzon 3y ago

The puzzling aspect is that, contrary to what most people would assume, the B, I, EM and STRONG elements all came out under the same version (2.0) of HTML: https://meiert.com/en/indices/html-elements/ https://meiert.com/en/indices/html-elements/

bensecure 3y ago
> https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_toc.html#SEC5.7 https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_toc.html#SEC5.... > Phrases may be marked up according to idiomatic usage, typographic appearance, or for use as hyperlink anchors. So the original standard considered both approaches valid, later standards decided that typographic usage was invalid.
- red_trumpet 3y ago
  No, there is a clear distinction between typographic and idiomatic markup. The i and b elements are considered typographic elements, not idiomatic ones (as em). So newer standards actually made them idiomatic.