New homepage design of d-p-l.org is now live. <eom>

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Stewart Gordon" <smjg_1998 at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:jcgkhi$2ohd$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 16/12/2011 18:26, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> <snip>
>> For example, I have an articles section on my site that (currently) uses
>> TangoCMS. I neither know nor care what doctype TangoCMS is sending out 
>> (and
>> I have even less interest in mucking with it's internals to change it), 
>> and
>> yet when I want to bold or italicize something in a post, I've started 
>> going
>> back to<b>  and<i>. Why?
>>
>> A. They're not as insanely verbose as<span style="font-weight: bold;
>> font-style: italic">
> <snip>
>
> But you shouldn't be using <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: 
> italic"> anyway. You should be looking at what the boldness or italicness 
> _means_, and either using the appropriate semantic HTML element or (if one 
> doesn't exist) defining a CSS class named after this semantic.
>
> This is also about making code self-documenting.
>

If it's actually part of some <span class="concept">ui element</span>, or 
<span class="concept">widget</span>, or some <span class="concept">standard 
recurring concept</span>, etc, then yes, I would agree in that case, <span 
class="person">Stewart</span>.

But if it's <i>just</i> ordinary text that simply needs to be <b>bolded</b> 
or <i>italicized</i>, then handling it in any roundabout way like that is 
just <i>ridiculous</i> (and "self-documenting" would be completely 
inapplicable).

In such a situation, replacing hardcoded bold or italic with some vague 
concept of "emphasis" (old-school example: the <em> tag) or 
"extra-emphasis", etc, is not only a useless abstraction merely for the sake 
of abstraction, it <b><i>can</i></b> subtly change meaning/interpretation of 
the actual <i>content</i> because only the <i>author</i>, not the stylist, 
is able to look at the final result and know whether the result 
<b><i>correctly</i></b> depicts the amount/type of emphasis intended.

Additionally, how does the stylist know if a given styling is going to cause 
too much visual noise? Or be too visually monotone? They <i>can't</i>, 
because it's <i>completely</i> dependent on the text that the 
<b><i>author</i></b> writes. It might be too much visual stuff for one 
article and just right for another. Only the text's author can know what's 
appropriate, not the stylesheet.