--- jworent@yahoo.com wrote:



> --- Edward Lass <elass@goer.state.ny.us> wrote:

> 
> The XHTML 2.0 draft includes a "normative style
> sheet": "While visual
> user agents implementing XHTML 2 are not required
to
> support CSS2, they
> are required to behave as if the following CSS2
> styles are in
> effect."[1]
> 
> I think what we're looking at here is (1) how well
> the normative style
> sheet visually conveys the semantics of these
levels
> of emphasis 

Yes, and arually.

>and (2)
> if new elements, attributes, or a normative
> microformat are needed in
> XHTML to make up for any inadequacies in the
> normative style sheet.
> 
> A present-day (X)HTML visual user agent, with CSS
> disabled, for
> Latin-script text, will currently default to four
> (not two) levels of
> emphasis: no elements (normal), <em/> (italic),
> <strong/> (bold), and
> <em><strong/></em> or vice versa (bold italic).

Your very correct, I had left out normal thinking
that it wasn really a level of emphesis, but your
correct, it is. I had also completely forgotten
about <em><strong/></em>. While I aggree that this
does acheve the effect, it still does not semanticly
describe the emphesis.

> 
> On the other hand, heading levels in the current
> (X)HTML offer six
> defaults, including one that is smaller than
normal
> text. Since XHTML is
> currently moving away from numbering them one
> through six,
> re-introducing that method for a different purpose
> would probably not be
> a good idea at this point. I would put aside the
> specific suggestion for
> a level attribute.
> 
> A more general principle of having more
> extensibility in marking up
> emphasis and de-emphasis is still worth
> considering.
> I agree with
> Alexandre Alapetite's earlier email suggesting
> multiple <strong/>
> elements, which seems consistent with XHTML's plan
> to match the new <h/>
> element to the number of <section/> elements.

I don't think nesting emphesis tags properly
describes what you are doing (ie: increasing or
decreasing emphesis) semanticly. Just because the
elements are nested doesn't mean they should act on
each other. Also, this doesn't allow for de-emphsis.

It shouldn't be too hard to add a level attribute.
The tabindex already allows for "0" and "-1", I'm
admittly unfamilular with schema though so its
probably more dificult than I think. 

> 
> But how would that fifth level of emphasis be
> visually represented by a
> normative style sheet? And how would de-emphasized
> text be represented?
> 
> 
> Maybe, for Western languages, as the semantic
> equivalent of the
> presentational <big/> and <small/> elements. Those
> are being obsoleted
> in the XHTML 2.0 draft. So what's a semantic
> replacement for <small/>?

Thats along the lines of what I was thinking. It would
be a matter of i18n to best represent this in other
languages.
   level -1 - progressivly decreasing text size from
              here down.
   level  0 - normal
   level  1 - italic
   level  2 - bold italic
   level  3 - bold italic and increasing text size  
              progressively form here
I suppose it would be best to try to match typical
voice inflections as closely as possible for aural
browsers.

> 
>  - Ed.
> 
> [1]
>
>
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2-style.html#a_stylesheet 
> 
> 

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