@aparrish @jalefkowit Truly, after opening that page
<p>I looked at it and thought <i>This can't be real!</i></p>
, I certainly did.
@gaditb @aparrish @jalefkowit@octodon.social i mean it's more that after committing to the bit of using <em> and <strong> for everything (in HTML4) some folks were like “okay but that actually DOESN’T work for everything we used to use <i> and <b> for” and so they had to walk it back
the names are afaik an MDN invention to make them easier to learn (since “bold” and “italics” is incorrect)—the spec just calls them “the b element” and “the i element”
as for why “bold” and “italics” is wrong—remember that other scripts exist than Latin and they need to be representable in HTML too :)
[using chinese emphasis marks to denote a scientific name for a species would be, i believe, profoundly incorrect]
@Lady @aparrish @jalefkowit "chinese emphasis marks"?
(say more about this if you'd be up for it, I don't know it and while I could look it up and you could reasonably respond "yeah, just look it up", its definition sounds like a productive addition to the conversation in the case where I'm not the only one whose extremely limited knowledge of Chinese doesn't go very far?)
@Lady @aparrish @jalefkowit But also, the Bit that I'm saying this is doggedly Committing To isn't so much "there are semantic reasons to use separate elements for this vs. that (there clearly are)" or "every element has semantic meaning (it clearly does, in these cases)",
but that "these elements have a CONSISTENT (across-usages), DESCRIBEABLE semantic meaning, if we simply generalize/precisely phrase it right". I think that's a Bit that they are -- quite enjoyably, and possibly usefully I'm not omniscient or psychic, and I definitely respect the effort -- straining themselves to Commit To.
@gaditb @aparrish @jalefkowit@octodon.social mm i think this is where the plurality of the HTML spec comes into play
for AUTHORS, the HTML spec is meant as a style guide for “good, proper HTML”. it's prescriptive, not descriptive. so they are saying “use A for X; use B for Y” not “A means X; B means Y”.
for IMPLEMENTERS, the HTML spec takes on a descriptive role. but there are no implementation requirements on these elements aside from the default stylesheet; from the perspective of an implementation, <b>/<i> aren’t required to mean anything.
anyway see https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/CO.html#COHQ if you want an example of an actually good, consistent, and semantic methodology for marking this stuff up; HTML is pretty far from being actually semantic markup in fact
