Re: non-breaking hyphen
Lachlan Hunt <spam.my.gspot@ gmail.com> wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> <nobr>a/b</nobr> says that a/b is a unit of information where all
>> characters belong together.[/color]
>
> That sounds like your just trying to apply semantics to an element
> that is defined as purely presentational.[/color]
That's because you have already decided so. Think about
rmdir /foo
versus
rmdir / foo
Is the difference purely presentational? That's what the Unicode
consortium thinks, when it allows the first expression to be divided as
rmdir /
foo
[color=blue][color=green]
>> It's surely _more_ semantic than the W3C approach which moves us
>> down to the character level.[/color]
>
> It depends. Some situations may be more appropriately marked up
> using elements, and others may be better left at the character level.[/color]
Moving it to character level means that presentational features have been
wired in into the document's textual content. Isn't this worse than
wiring it in into markup around the content? Things may change, of
course, if we regards line breaking issues as potentially belonging to
logical structure or semantics.
[color=blue]
> There are also a huge number of situations where I might want bold
> text.[/color]
Not really. Ignoring headings, table cells and things like that and
considering inline emphasis only, the odds are that the reason for
bolding text is strong emphasis. Whether this is too coarse a concept is
an interesting question, but it corresponds to the <strong> element.
Except for a small number of special cases, <b> is just the vulgar way of
writing <strong> (and the original designers of HTML should be blamed for
this - _they_ decided to make the logical alternative's name five times
as long as the physical alternative's name).
[color=blue]
> I find the news: URIs more useful since clicking on one will
> automatically launcy my newsreader for me[/color]
It won't launch any newsreader unless the browser has been configured to
use one - and this is normally _not_ handled in any default settings.
[color=blue][color=green][color=darkred]
>>>In this case, <code> seems most approprate.[/color]
>>
>> Is the name computer code? I think it's a borderline case, and I
>> think you are just interpreting the semantics of <code> very freely[/color]
>
> Yes, it was a very loose interpretation, however <code> is very
> loosely defined in the spec.[/color]
We agree on that, though maybe for different values of "very". But the
reason for your choosing it was that you felt that you _needed_ _any_
element that you can regard as logical. That is, in an attempt to avoid
<nobr> and <span>, you would have picked up virtually anything, even an
element that you wouldn't have dreamt of otherwise.
But it's not necessarily a bad choice.
[color=blue]
> It just states that it is a fragment of
> comoputer code, and I interpreted that very loosely as content that
> can be processed in some meaningful way be a computer.[/color]
That would mean that anything is <code>, wouldn't it? Surely you can feed
any text into a computer and process it in some meaningful way.
But a newsgroup name could be marked up as <code> because it is "computer
code" in the sense of having been _defined_ separately for use as input
to computer software, as an identifier of a group. This becomes more
obvious, perhaps, if you think how newsgroup names often have to be
distorted from the natural language expressions that they have been
derived from, e.g. by dropping accents away.
On the practical side, some automatic translation software (BabelFish)
treats text inside <code> as a literal string that remains invariant in
translation. And this is very natural and very desirable, since if we
have, say, some text about Unix, mentioning the <code>cat</code> command,
then we don't want that "cat" to become "chat" when translating into
French.
[color=blue][color=green]
>> in order to avoid the inevitable conclusion: in the great majority
>> of cases, the real alternative to <nobr> is <span>, which by
>> definition lacks _all_ semantics.[/color]
>
> As does <nobr>, so in a sense you are correct.[/color]
No it doesn't. Even if you regard <nobr> as purely presentational,
marking something with <nobr> says _more_ than marking it with <span>.
Just as <b class="vector"> says more than <span class="vector"> . The
former says, loosely speaking, 'here we have an element with undefined
meaning, but the preferred visual rendering is bold'. It does not say
what the meaning is, but it may give a hint.
[color=blue]
> Classes can be used to give author defined semantics, even to
> semantically empty elements.[/color]
What author defined semantics? The class name has no meaning; it is
simply a string. The author may have something in his mind, and someone
reading the source code might get a hint if he happens to know the
natural language from which the name had been taken. But this is
different from the hint given by <b> (or by <nobr>, even if you regard it
as presentational only), as defined by the _markup language_.
Would you understand the author defined semantics of
class="lauseke" or class="korostus "?
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html
Lachlan Hunt <spam.my.gspot@ gmail.com> wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> <nobr>a/b</nobr> says that a/b is a unit of information where all
>> characters belong together.[/color]
>
> That sounds like your just trying to apply semantics to an element
> that is defined as purely presentational.[/color]
That's because you have already decided so. Think about
rmdir /foo
versus
rmdir / foo
Is the difference purely presentational? That's what the Unicode
consortium thinks, when it allows the first expression to be divided as
rmdir /
foo
[color=blue][color=green]
>> It's surely _more_ semantic than the W3C approach which moves us
>> down to the character level.[/color]
>
> It depends. Some situations may be more appropriately marked up
> using elements, and others may be better left at the character level.[/color]
Moving it to character level means that presentational features have been
wired in into the document's textual content. Isn't this worse than
wiring it in into markup around the content? Things may change, of
course, if we regards line breaking issues as potentially belonging to
logical structure or semantics.
[color=blue]
> There are also a huge number of situations where I might want bold
> text.[/color]
Not really. Ignoring headings, table cells and things like that and
considering inline emphasis only, the odds are that the reason for
bolding text is strong emphasis. Whether this is too coarse a concept is
an interesting question, but it corresponds to the <strong> element.
Except for a small number of special cases, <b> is just the vulgar way of
writing <strong> (and the original designers of HTML should be blamed for
this - _they_ decided to make the logical alternative's name five times
as long as the physical alternative's name).
[color=blue]
> I find the news: URIs more useful since clicking on one will
> automatically launcy my newsreader for me[/color]
It won't launch any newsreader unless the browser has been configured to
use one - and this is normally _not_ handled in any default settings.
[color=blue][color=green][color=darkred]
>>>In this case, <code> seems most approprate.[/color]
>>
>> Is the name computer code? I think it's a borderline case, and I
>> think you are just interpreting the semantics of <code> very freely[/color]
>
> Yes, it was a very loose interpretation, however <code> is very
> loosely defined in the spec.[/color]
We agree on that, though maybe for different values of "very". But the
reason for your choosing it was that you felt that you _needed_ _any_
element that you can regard as logical. That is, in an attempt to avoid
<nobr> and <span>, you would have picked up virtually anything, even an
element that you wouldn't have dreamt of otherwise.
But it's not necessarily a bad choice.
[color=blue]
> It just states that it is a fragment of
> comoputer code, and I interpreted that very loosely as content that
> can be processed in some meaningful way be a computer.[/color]
That would mean that anything is <code>, wouldn't it? Surely you can feed
any text into a computer and process it in some meaningful way.
But a newsgroup name could be marked up as <code> because it is "computer
code" in the sense of having been _defined_ separately for use as input
to computer software, as an identifier of a group. This becomes more
obvious, perhaps, if you think how newsgroup names often have to be
distorted from the natural language expressions that they have been
derived from, e.g. by dropping accents away.
On the practical side, some automatic translation software (BabelFish)
treats text inside <code> as a literal string that remains invariant in
translation. And this is very natural and very desirable, since if we
have, say, some text about Unix, mentioning the <code>cat</code> command,
then we don't want that "cat" to become "chat" when translating into
French.
[color=blue][color=green]
>> in order to avoid the inevitable conclusion: in the great majority
>> of cases, the real alternative to <nobr> is <span>, which by
>> definition lacks _all_ semantics.[/color]
>
> As does <nobr>, so in a sense you are correct.[/color]
No it doesn't. Even if you regard <nobr> as purely presentational,
marking something with <nobr> says _more_ than marking it with <span>.
Just as <b class="vector"> says more than <span class="vector"> . The
former says, loosely speaking, 'here we have an element with undefined
meaning, but the preferred visual rendering is bold'. It does not say
what the meaning is, but it may give a hint.
[color=blue]
> Classes can be used to give author defined semantics, even to
> semantically empty elements.[/color]
What author defined semantics? The class name has no meaning; it is
simply a string. The author may have something in his mind, and someone
reading the source code might get a hint if he happens to know the
natural language from which the name had been taken. But this is
different from the hint given by <b> (or by <nobr>, even if you regard it
as presentational only), as defined by the _markup language_.
Would you understand the author defined semantics of
class="lauseke" or class="korostus "?
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html
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