

Re: Cleaning House

From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 04:00:22 -0500
Message-ID: <463AF626.1010707@mit.edu>

Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
>> Some people are suggesting that it should fall on the pure-semantic 
>> end of things (without really explaining how this is supposed to work 
>> given a very limited vocabulary and the desire to express a wide 
>> variety of complex concepts).
> By expanding the limited vocabulary.

Yes, but that quickly runs into complexity limitations.  The fact is, the only 
really decent semantic markups I've seen were trying to target a very narrow 
range of documents.  If HTML is trying to target a wide range (which it seems it 
is), it's not going to be able to represent the shades of meaning that a more 
narrowly targeted language could.

It's just a tradeoff between it being easy to learn and author and how precise 
you can be in it...

Note that I'm not against adding new semantic elements if they're useful, not at 
all.  But there are so many possible things to add (because HTML is trying to 
target a wide range of possible documents), and we can't really add them all 
(because then we'd have tens of thousands of elements).

> I dislike the practically non-existent distinction between <em> and 
> <strong>


Received on Friday, 4 May 2007 09:00:55 GMT
