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[Nick Sabalausky]

"Stewart Gordon" <smjg_1998 at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:jci2bj$225s$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 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"?

To be clear, I didn't mean that as in "plaintext"...if that's what you 
meant...? I meant like the examples in that paragraph (not all of which were 
literal examples of bold/italic).

> If the point is to illustrate what bold looks like, or what italics look 
> like, _then_ it might make sense to use presentational markup....
>

Only "might"? ;)

>> 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.
>

Ok. It was a dedicated HTML tag instead of a span/div with class attribute. 
Seems like most of those are non-kosher these days.

>> 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.

Yes. Well, too vague, really.

> I'm not sure how best to deal with this either.

It's easy to deal with: You just say "Fuck dat 'purity' booshit, I'm usin' 
<b> and <i>!!" :)

And as far as inferring semantic meaning, I think it's pretty obvious that 
<b> and <i> imply "this text is emphasised". (Not that I can imagine any 
realistic use for being able to identify what text is emphasised.)

> Moreover, what markup are you going to use so that it looks/sounds/feels 
> right in non-graphical browsers?
>

Non-graphical browsers are going to result in a *lot* of difference from the 
original style/layout anyway. There's a lot of stuff that's going to be 
wrong. If you're using one, it's just understood that you're merely viewing 
an approximation.

>> 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.
>

Not necessarily. Imagine a paragraph that uses a fair amount of italic, but 
not quite an overuse of italic, so it still looks fine. If that's done with, 
say <em>, and the stylist changes <em> from italic to either bold or 
bold+italic, it's suddenly going to look like shit. It'll *become* an 
overuse, and the only way for the stylist to fix it is to just let the 
author choose bold/italic/etc on their own.

Maybe I'm just atypical as an author, but when I write something and use 
emphasis, I take into account things like bold/italic and how it'll look 
when I decide what to emphasise, how, and how much. If I *do* use things 
like <em>, I inevitably end up choosing them based *not* on "level of 
emphasis" but on whether they end up being bold/italic/underline/etc...Which 
obviously defeats the whole damn point of <em>, etc. I'd be surprised if 
most people do it any different from that. Heck, I almost always end up 
changing my emphasis/bold/italic/etc after writing+previewing it because it 
never looks right until I've tweaked it *taking into account* the final 
presentation. Honestly, I can't imagine how anyone could do it effectively 
without having direct control over such things (even if it's by abusing 
levels of emphasis as euphamisms for more specific stylings). I think 
there's good reason wiki markups invariably have syntax for "bold" and 
"italic" rather than "emphasis".

There's two basic problems with the idealistic separation of presentation 
from content:

1. (X)HTML and CSS are just simply not very good as "(X)HTML is content" and 
"CSS is presentation". You can get by in *some* cases, but in general 
they're just poorly suited for it. I think that *part* of the problem may be 
that it's like ColdFusion: A mediocre Model and a mediocre View hooked 
directly together with basically no Controller.

2. Content and presentation *are not always separable*. There *is* 
interplay. And this makes a strict and complete separation of content and 
presentation nothing more than yet another example in programming's long 
history of idealistic dreams (like Java's "everything must be OO" purity, 
Haskell's "everything must be functional" purity, etc.) As always, puritism 
sucks and needs to tempered with pragmatism.