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Bug 13301 - The u element represents "an unarticulated non-textual annotation." Are you serious? I think it would be good to give that one another try, this time in English. And is marking up Chinese names the only example you could find? It seems you want people
Summary: The u element represents "an unarticulated non-textual annotation." Are you ...
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: 2011-07-19 16:49 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-08-04 05:04 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-07-19 16:49:04 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#the-u-element
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#the-u-element

Comment:
The u element represents "an unarticulated non-textual annotation."  Are you
serious?  I think it would be good to give that one another try, this time in
English.  And is marking up Chinese names the only example you could find?  It
seems you want people to stop using this element.  Or to ignore this
unfathomable explanation and continue to think of u as underline.  (Sorry to
be so harsh; I'm just stunned by the unhelpfulness of this explanation.)

Posted from: 129.83.31.1
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.122 Safari/534.30
Comment 1 Aryeh Gregor 2011-07-20 01:05:59 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: Additional Information Needed
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale:

Could you suggest better text to describe the element?  It would be pretty hard for the editor to address this comment unless you're more specific.  You've pointed out things that you find problematic, but haven't suggested any better replacements.

Note that the spec formerly didn't permit <u>, and the editor was forced to add it despite the fact that he thinks it serves no legitimate purpose and shouldn't be part of the language.  It's hard to write good spec text under those conditions.
Comment 2 James Garriss 2011-07-20 12:15:18 UTC 
> Could you suggest better text to describe the element?

You are absolutely right, Aryeh.  That is what I should have done.  But I can't.  I honestly have no idea what "an unarticulated non-textual annotation" means, so I'm unable to suggest anything better.  :-(

You note that the editor was forced to add this element.  Can I ask why?  What was the rationale behind this forcing?  If I knew that, perhaps I could be of more assistance.

Alternatively, could you explain it to me better?

Thanks for listening.
Comment 3 Aryeh Gregor 2011-07-20 17:01:57 UTC 
This should provide the background on the Working Group decision that led to <u> becoming conforming:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Apr/0212.html

I supported that decision, but I can't provide good spec text either, because I think <b>/<i>/<u>/etc. should all just be defined as presentational elements.  So I'd just say "<u> is a shortcut for <span style=text-decoration:underline>", but that's not consistent with the definitions for similar elements.
Comment 4 James Garriss 2011-07-20 18:17:35 UTC 
That was a very helpful link, Aryeh, thank you.  

It seems to me that this would all be much easier if we could simply state the obvious:  <u> = underline.  Isn't this paving the cowpath of WYSIWYG editors?

So I would say this:

The u element represents underlined text.  (In general it is preferable to use CSS for presentation, but in some cases, such as WYSIWYG editors, it is acceptable to use HTML markup for presentation.)

I would delete the non-textual annotation stuff and the Chinese name and misspelling examples.

Of course, I would suggest doing something similar for <b> and <i>.  

(My suggestion is not going to go over well with the editor, is it?  But it does reflect reality, I think.)

Thanks for your help!
Comment 5 Aryeh Gregor 2011-07-21 22:42:56 UTC 
I personally agree with you, but Hixie is the editor and he doesn't agree, so I don't think there's any point in leaving this open and wasting his time when we know his answer in advance.
Comment 6 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-08-04 05:04:04 UTC 
mass-moved component to LC1