Re: Underline element.

Once upon a time, Mankind communicated through
a series of grunts.  As language emerged,
proto-man expressed concepts as simply as
possible : "Mammoth : kill" or "Sabre-tooth
tiger : run".  As we continued to evolve,
so did our language, and now there are many
amongst us who prefer to use language as a surgeon's
scalpel rather than as a mechanic's mallet.

In just the same way, markup languages have
evolved over time, and many of us (but clearly
not yet all) seek to express not-so-subtle
distinctions such as "Ship-name" v. "Linnaean-binomial"
v. "Book-title" through the medium of our
markup.  Surely it is not too much to ask that
the dinosaurs who can see no further than "<i>"
to express all of these recognise that their
time is long since past, and yield gracefully
to those who are preparing for the future ?

Philip TAYLOR
--------
Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> Beyond the typographical convention of italicising ship names in English 
> prose, what compelling use case is there for extracting such a ship name 
>  from such prose?  Why would an author have any desire to add such 
> markup using a custom vocabulary that few tools, if any, will understand 
> and even fewer users would have any use for?
> 
> It seems to me that simply using <i> for the ship name (perhaps using a 
> class name for additional styling purposes) fulfills the the 
> typographical convention use case, without the unnecessary addition of 
> RDFa.
> 

Received on Tuesday, 8 January 2008 13:42:05 UTC