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Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/text-level-semantics.html Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#the-dfn-element Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#the-dfn-element Comment: I think the change to dfn being the defining instance of a term removes one previously solid use case for dfn: defining unfamiliar terms that may make no sense to define in context. For instance, use of "borrowed" terms and phrases from other languages that may be unfamiliar to the reader. In that case, a simple dfn element with lang attribute and title to define the term or phrase seems proper. Without that use available, there becomes a hole in HTML's semantics that was previously plugged and there are no other elements that make sense to replace dfn in that instance. Posted from: 74.221.190.5 User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.215 Safari/535.1
The change to dfn being the defining instance of a term removes one previously solid use case for dfn: defining unfamiliar terms that may make no sense to define in context. For instance, use of "borrowed" terms and phrases from other languages. For example: <p>I like to work with markup languages because <strong>they are simple and easy to read</strong>. They also have that certain <dfn lang="fr" title="I don’t know what">je ne sais quoi</dfn>.</p>
(In reply to comment #1) > The change to dfn being the defining instance of a term removes one previously > solid use case for dfn: defining unfamiliar terms that may make no sense to > define in context. For instance, use of "borrowed" terms and phrases from other > languages. For example: > > <p>I like to work with markup languages because <strong>they are simple and > easy to read</strong>. They also have that certain <dfn lang="fr" title="I > don’t know what">je ne sais quoi</dfn>.</p> The spec has a similar example: <p>There is a certain <i lang="fr">je ne sais quoi</i> in the air.</p> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/text-level-semantics.html#the-i-element Your example says the language of the title is french. Maybe you could mark it up as follows: <p>I like to work with markup languages because <strong>they are simple and easy to read</strong>. They also have that certain <span title="I don’t know what"><i lang="fr">je ne sais quoi</i></span>.</p>
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: Accepted Change Description: no spec change Rationale: See comment 2.
(In reply to comment #2) > The spec has a similar example: > > <p>There is a certain <i lang="fr">je ne sais quoi</i> in the air.</p> > http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/text-level-semantics.html#the-i-element Ok, so i has replaced dfn in managing these cases. I guess that makes sense. Thanks!