Hi Jukka and Jens,

At 14:14 18/10/2005, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

>On Tue, 18 Oct 2005, Jens Meiert wrote:
>
>>* In general, why ain't it allowed to include markup within the "title"
>>element [1], what's the historical background?
>
>If you look at the good old HTML 2.0 specification, you can see some of 
>the intended uses of the content of the <title> element. Many of them 
>involve treating the content as plain text. It is probably better that you 
>directly write it as plain text, rather than let some software 
>transmogrify it into plain text.

I don't expect a change to "title" in HTML 4 or XHTML 1.x, but the ability 
to mark up changes in natural language in "title" has been requested for 
XHTML 2.0.

>(...)
>>* Also in general, why is there no way to designate rather "unimportant"
>>text?
>
>Do you want the real answer or a good explanation? The real answer is 
>being important was not really important.
>
>>I can use "em" and "strong" for emphasis,
>
>You can, while others use <i> and <b>. The <em> and <strong> were 
>introduced just as clones of <i> and <b> for academicians. The official 
>story is different, but you may make some conclusions from the fact that
>- there is no real semantic definition for <em> and <strong>
>   (e.g., how they relate to each other, and what does it mean
>   to nest them?)

The same kind of definition is still lacking from the current draft of 
XHTML 2 [1]:
"The em element indicates emphasis for its contents."
"The strong element indicates higher importance for its contents than that 
of the surrounding content."


>- nobody cared to add markup for "unimportant" or "de-emphasis",
>   despite the obvious need as soon as you start thinking semantically.

This could still be added to the Text Module of XHTML 2. I forgot to add this
to my own comments on the current Working Draft [2].


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-xhtml2-20050527/mod-text.html 
[2] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html-editor/2005JulSep/att-0040/XHTML2_20050527_comments.html 

Regards,

Christophe Strobbe


-- 
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group on 
Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee - BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/  


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