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I understand, but honestly this is really not my problem. That's the problem of someone reading and writing non-Latin scripts. In my Latin scripts, I see bold a

I understand, but honestly this is really not my problem. That's the problem of someone reading and writing non-Latin scripts. In my Latin scripts, I see bold and italic and underline all the time and obviously I need a way to mark these, since they have very well-defined textual semantics in the kind of script I'm working with. If these semantics don't apply to Japanese, for example, then just don't use and in Japanese? Make a <傍点> or <sideline> tag for Japanese that shows up in the Japanese version of Wordpress and other CMS's. Why would someone writing English have to think about how bold text looks like in Japanese? That makes no sense. Even for accessibility it makes no sense. As far as I know, screen readers don't even announce bold/italic/em/strong or them differently. And if they announced, I'd expect any italic text I ever write to be read out loud as "in italics..." not "in emphasis..." I genuinely can not understand the thought process that went into creating these tags. It's like they completely ignored the idea that text as a medium has its own layer of semantics and tried to skip over it. But this is just my personal opinion. In the end the objective facts are that and don't really do anything in the real world besides wasting more bytes than and , so there's exactly zero benefits in using them. I really wish someone would prove me wrong, though, hence this thread.

LukeBMM 3y ago
As a (relatively, though age is catching up with my vision, admittedly) able-bodied Westerner who reads no other languages than English, I find this opinion shocking. Would paraphrasing your point as, "I don't think anyone who reads in any way other than the one I'm familiar with deserves knowledge," have a different impact, or does that seem ok to you, too?
- AlienRobot 3y ago
 No. The correct paraphrase would be "I think you should recognize that text is different from speech and English is different from Japanese and welcome the diversity of media of knowledge instead of trying to make an one-size-fits-all solution for every method to convey information that the human body is capable of." Imagine if I had a markup language for voice synthesis. If I typed a word, the computer would say out loud that word. But I had tags like <whisper> and <yell> to change the volume of the computer voice, and <pausedly> and <quickly> to change its speed. These tags make no sense in the text medium, and yet their semantics are self-evident in speech. If authors had a way to mark up how their text should be voiced, perhaps they would mark them so. Who wouldn't love a real <sarcasm> tag for sarcastically voiced text? But HTML went the opposite way. Instead of providing more tools to let authors express themselves, they took every format of expression and dumped it in a single label.
 - LukeBMM 3y ago
 Changing the context to voice markup doesn't in any way change or address the core point, which is that you really seem to be expressing that you only care about the way that you happen to consume text and therefore any other viewpoints are superfluous. Also that you're willing to go out of your way to create and publish a plugin to effectively sabotage anyone trying to do anything else. Of all the opinions someone could hold strongly, that's certainly one of them.
 - AlienRobot 3y ago
 >you really seem to be expressing that you only care about the way that you happen to consume text No, I only care about the way I write text. If I'm writing an article and I want to make text bold, I don't want to waste my time having to come up with a deeper explanation about WHY should the text be bold. That's an obstacle in the creative process. I want bold text. Period. I don't want or , and I don't want a "bring attention to" element". I want bold. Can you say that EVERY SINGLE TIME I want bold text that will match the semantics of ? If that's true, then it shouldn't be called , it should be called <bold>. If that's not true, then one day I'll mark something as because I want bold text and it will be the incorrect tag for that text because of a semantic mismatch. In that case, what should I do? Should I just use or for my bold text? Are you telling me that every time I want bold text I'll have to make the conscious choice of deciding whether I should use a tag or a tag? Can you imagine the nightmare of making this work in a CMS like Wordpress? It would be much easier to just never use at all and just use for bold every time. If the only way to make sure you're using the semantics correctly is to just never use the tag at all, I say we just give up on this nonsense and use the tag which matches the semantics of what the person writing the text wants to convey.
 - TomaszZielinski 3y ago
 > I don't want or , and I don't want a "bring attention to" element". I want bold. When I read the above, I thought: you want bold, because you want to highlight a word. Because highlighting a word is a widely recognized way to bring attention to it. And so making it bold is just a tool, it's secondary to the actual goal. I suspect you might not agree with that, but could you point me to the part where I got it wrong from your perspective?
kstenerud 3y ago
Imagine writing code that outputs to HTML for your company. They require support for emphasizing some words, so you use the i and b tags. Your company then decides that Japanese text should be supported. Now your code needs to output italics / underlines for English, or emphasis dots / enlarged text / font change in Japanese. You dutifully add the style sheet shenanigans and special case HTML generator code to do this. Next, your company wants to support Hindi. So now your code needs to support three different ways to render the text depending on intent and language - with all the maintenance headache this entails. ... and so on. Soon enough you start to think "This is crazy! I'll just make some style classes for things that need emphasizing, and then put the presentation stuff in the style sheets. That way I can greatly simplify things!" And now you've invented em and strong. The whole reason why style sheets were invented was to separate intent from presentation. The i and b tags in HTML are a classic example of engineering failure due to the assumption that they knew enough about a subject outside of their wheelhouse, and as a result failed to consult the experts (in this case, typesetters). Once the experts weighed in, the i and b tags were (rightly) deprecated.

LukeBMM 3y ago

As a (relatively, though age is catching up with my vision, admittedly) able-bodied Westerner who reads no other languages than English, I find this opinion shocking. Would paraphrasing your point as, "I don't think anyone who reads in any way other than the one I'm familiar with deserves knowledge," have a different impact, or does that seem ok to you, too?

AlienRobot 3y ago
No. The correct paraphrase would be "I think you should recognize that text is different from speech and English is different from Japanese and welcome the diversity of media of knowledge instead of trying to make an one-size-fits-all solution for every method to convey information that the human body is capable of." Imagine if I had a markup language for voice synthesis. If I typed a word, the computer would say out loud that word. But I had tags like <whisper> and <yell> to change the volume of the computer voice, and <pausedly> and <quickly> to change its speed. These tags make no sense in the text medium, and yet their semantics are self-evident in speech. If authors had a way to mark up how their text should be voiced, perhaps they would mark them so. Who wouldn't love a real <sarcasm> tag for sarcastically voiced text? But HTML went the opposite way. Instead of providing more tools to let authors express themselves, they took every format of expression and dumped it in a single label.
- LukeBMM 3y ago
 Changing the context to voice markup doesn't in any way change or address the core point, which is that you really seem to be expressing that you only care about the way that you happen to consume text and therefore any other viewpoints are superfluous. Also that you're willing to go out of your way to create and publish a plugin to effectively sabotage anyone trying to do anything else. Of all the opinions someone could hold strongly, that's certainly one of them.
 - AlienRobot 3y ago
 >you really seem to be expressing that you only care about the way that you happen to consume text No, I only care about the way I write text. If I'm writing an article and I want to make text bold, I don't want to waste my time having to come up with a deeper explanation about WHY should the text be bold. That's an obstacle in the creative process. I want bold text. Period. I don't want or , and I don't want a "bring attention to" element". I want bold. Can you say that EVERY SINGLE TIME I want bold text that will match the semantics of ? If that's true, then it shouldn't be called , it should be called <bold>. If that's not true, then one day I'll mark something as because I want bold text and it will be the incorrect tag for that text because of a semantic mismatch. In that case, what should I do? Should I just use or for my bold text? Are you telling me that every time I want bold text I'll have to make the conscious choice of deciding whether I should use a tag or a tag? Can you imagine the nightmare of making this work in a CMS like Wordpress? It would be much easier to just never use at all and just use for bold every time. If the only way to make sure you're using the semantics correctly is to just never use the tag at all, I say we just give up on this nonsense and use the tag which matches the semantics of what the person writing the text wants to convey.
 - TomaszZielinski 3y ago
 > I don't want or , and I don't want a "bring attention to" element". I want bold. When I read the above, I thought: you want bold, because you want to highlight a word. Because highlighting a word is a widely recognized way to bring attention to it. And so making it bold is just a tool, it's secondary to the actual goal. I suspect you might not agree with that, but could you point me to the part where I got it wrong from your perspective?

kstenerud 3y ago

Imagine writing code that outputs to HTML for your company. They require support for emphasizing some words, so you use the i and b tags. Your company then decides that Japanese text should be supported. Now your code needs to output italics / underlines for English, or emphasis dots / enlarged text / font change in Japanese. You dutifully add the style sheet shenanigans and special case HTML generator code to do this. Next, your company wants to support Hindi. So now your code needs to support three different ways to render the text depending on intent and language - with all the maintenance headache this entails. ... and so on. Soon enough you start to think "This is crazy! I'll just make some style classes for things that need emphasizing, and then put the presentation stuff in the style sheets. That way I can greatly simplify things!" And now you've invented em and strong. The whole reason why style sheets were invented was to separate intent from presentation. The i and b tags in HTML are a classic example of engineering failure due to the assumption that they knew enough about a subject outside of their wheelhouse, and as a result failed to consult the experts (in this case, typesetters). Once the experts weighed in, the i and b tags were (rightly) deprecated.