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Bug 11915 - Suggestion: Instead of forbidding <u> and inventing <mark> you could as well redefine <u> to be what <mark> is intended for -- roughly the same idea as for <i> and <b>. Clearly not all old HTML4 <i> / <b> / <u> match what the new HTML5 <i> / <b> / <mark>
Summary: Suggestion: Instead of forbidding <u> and inventing <mark> you could as well ...
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LC1 HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-01-29 05:06 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-08-04 05:04 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-01-29 05:06:13 UTC 
Specification: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html
Section: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#top

Comment:
Suggestion: Instead of forbidding <u> and inventing <mark> you could as well
redefine <u> to be what <mark> is intended for -- roughly the same idea as for

<i> and <b>. Clearly not all old HTML4 <i> / <b> / <u> match what the new
HTML5 <i> / <b> / <mark> will be, but as this is no serious problem for <i>
and <b> it should be also no serious problem for <u>.

There are many appplications offering I + B + U, e.g., forum software and
simple "HTML" input in comment forms. For some use cases <mark> would require
13 keystrokes, where <u> only needs 7.	Personally I'm no fan of the old <u>
and would not miss it, but you could specify a good new <u> instead of <mark>.


- Frank <mailto:hmdmhdfmhdjmzdtjmzdtzktdkztdjz@gmail.com>

Posted from: 82.113.121.49
Comment 1 Lars Gunther 2011-01-30 18:44:50 UTC 
There is a huge diffeence between <mark> and <u> and that is default styling. Underlined text that is not a link is a big usability problem. As a teacher this proposal will be burdensome.

Yes, <u> used to mean underline but now it means "mark", but in order to use it without deteriorating usability you MUST remove that styling. Thus, you have an element that sounds like it underlines, but should not use it for that. And it will validate, not giving authors a chance to catch bad usage, i.e. when it IS being used for the underline effect, that should be done in CSS.

The web teacher in me cries NO, when I read this proposal.
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-02-19 00:18:43 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: We considered this, actually. The main reason we didn't do it is that we're hoping browsers will introduce behaviour for <mark> such as highlighting the scrollbar, and it's not realistic to do that with <u>.
Comment 3 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-08-04 05:04:39 UTC 
mass-moved component to LC1