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

[Stewart Gordon]

On 17/12/2011 06:35, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
<snip>
> 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).

You miss the point - why would you need to bold or italicise "ordinary text"?  If the 
point is to illustrate what bold looks like, or what italics look like, _then_ it might 
make sense to use presentational markup....

> In such a situation, replacing hardcoded bold or italic with some vague
> concept of "emphasis" (old-school example: the<em>  tag)

<em> isn't really an old-school example.  It's the proper semantic markup for emphasis.

> 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.

It seems to me that the essence of what you're saying is that the choice of <em> and 
<strong> is too coarse-grained for your purposes.  I'm not sure how best to deal with this 
either.  Moreover, what markup are you going to use so that it looks/sounds/feels right in 
non-graphical browsers?

> 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.

If the author is overusing emphasis, manually setting font weights and stuff to compensate 
seems to me to be trying to fix the wrong problem.

Stewart.