Why are <small> and <big> better than <font>?

L

Leif K-Brooks

Why are <big> and <small> better than <font>, and why on earth are they
included in the strict DTD?
 
L

Leif K-Brooks

Geoff said:
The font element is deprecated, to remove presentational markup from HTML
and XHTML. Font adjustments should be suggested using CSS.
I know that. My question is why <small> and <big> are any better than
<font>.
 
L

Leif K-Brooks

Kris said:
They are not. They suck. As Jeff said, use CSS for presentational
details. CSS rocks your mom when applied to struturally rich HTML. <big>
and <small> are not that.
Exactly what I thought, which is why I don't understand why they're in
the strict DTD. Just noticed <i> and <b> are there too... now I'm confused.
 
G

Geoff Ball

Leif K-Brooks said:
Exactly what I thought, which is why I don't understand why they're in
the strict DTD. Just noticed <i> and <b> are there too... now I'm
confused.

The i and b elements are there not because of how they affect the text
presentationally, but rather how they affect it semantically. In other
words, not because the i element italicizes text, but because it changes
the meaning of the text in some way (which is not possible with CSS).

However, I believe b and i are deprecated now, and emphasis elements are
preferred (em and strong).

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1

Regards,
Geoff
 
L

Leif K-Brooks

Geoff said:
The i and b elements are there not because of how they affect the text
presentationally, but rather how they affect it semantically. In other
words, not because the i element italicizes text, but because it changes
the meaning of the text in some way (which is not possible with CSS).
How do they affect text semantically?
 
G

Geoff Ball

How do they affect text semantically?

I answered this already. I said that they change the meaning of the text in
some way. For example, the reason for the bold element might be to
emphasize the text more.

ie.

Remember to turn <b>left</b> on Robson St.

Another example could be using the i element to suggest sarcasm.

ie.

Oh yeah. It was <i>so</i> much fun.

In both examples, it's not guaranteed that the User Agent will bolden and
italicize the text. What about a screen reader, which doesn't have a
display at all? However, they would change the interpretation of the text,
which is why they are useful beyond their presentational effects.

This differs from font, which didn't have any semantic meaning, and only
changes the color, face, and size of the text (and don't bother arguing
that using it to change the size has semantic meaning, because there are
other ways of doing that; and besides, changing the size still had no
effect in a screen reader).

Regards,
Geoff
 
T

Toby A Inkster

I answered this already. I said that they change the meaning of the text in
some way. For example, the reason for the bold element might be to
emphasize the text more.

Nonsense. The <b> and <i> elements are completely without semantics, which
is why they have been removed from XHTML as of XHTML 2.0.

OTOH, I don't entirely disapprove of <small>, as it could fill the void
for an opposite of <em>/<strong>.
 
J

Joel Shepherd

Leif said:
How do they affect text semantically?

In some fields it's common to use italics or other presentational
devices to denote proper names. Ship names are frequently italicized
or upper-cased, in biology genus and species names are frequently
italicized, and so on. There's no <ship> or <genus> tag in HTML, so
<i> suffices. Use of <i> for this purpose is more appropriate than
<span>, as the author is not *suggesting* the name be italicized for
sake of appearance; but rather it is imperative the name be italicized
(or highlighted in some other way) to denote its semantic significance.

E.g., lack of stylesheet support should not reduce one's ability to
properly comprehend "Harry S. Truman pulled out of Bremerton today",
"Harry S. Truman" being the name of a ship in this context, not the
historic personage, "Bremerton" being the name of the city in
Washington State, not the ship.
 
L

Leif K-Brooks

Joel said:
In some fields it's common to use italics or other presentational
devices to denote proper names. Ship names are frequently italicized or
upper-cased, in biology genus and species names are frequently
italicized, and so on. There's no <ship> or <genus> tag in HTML, so <i>
suffices. Use of <i> for this purpose is more appropriate than <span>,
as the author is not *suggesting* the name be italicized for sake of
appearance; but rather it is imperative the name be italicized (or
highlighted in some other way) to denote its semantic significance.

E.g., lack of stylesheet support should not reduce one's ability to
properly comprehend "Harry S. Truman pulled out of Bremerton today",
"Harry S. Truman" being the name of a ship in this context, not the
historic personage, "Bremerton" being the name of the city in Washington
State, not the ship.
However, the <i> is still of not semantic. It doesn't say "this is a
ship's name", it says "this is italic text". The italic rendering may
be important, but it still has no semantic meaning.
 
T

Toby A Inkster

"Harry S. Truman pulled out of Bremerton today",

<em class="ship">Harry S Truman</em> pulled out of Bremerton today.

<em> is more appropriate than <i>, because it conveys meaning to
non-visual browsers, and browser that otherwise do not support italic
typefaces.
 
G

Geoff Ball

Nonsense. The <b> and <i> elements are completely without semantics, which
is why they have been removed from XHTML as of XHTML 2.0.

Refer to Joel's post <for a perfect
example of when the i element would be appropriate.

Regards,
Geoff
 
G

Geoff Ball

Geoff Ball said:
alt.html:

Refer to Joel's post <for a
perfect example of when the i element would be appropriate.

I should note that I mean the above for italicizing text, not for adding
semantic meaning.

Regards,
Geoff
 
S

Steve Pugh

Toby A Inkster said:
<em class="ship">Harry S Truman</em> pulled out of Bremerton today.

<em> is more appropriate than <i>, because it conveys meaning to
non-visual browsers, and browser that otherwise do not support italic
typefaces.

It conveys a precise meaning, namely emphasis. Ship names are
italicised, they are not emphasised.

Steve
 
L

Lauri Raittila

Toby A Inkster said:
<em class="ship">Harry S Truman</em> pulled out of Bremerton today.

<em> is more appropriate than <i>, because it conveys meaning to
non-visual browsers, and browser that otherwise do not support italic
typefaces.

But remeber to specify

..ship {font-style:italic;font-weight:inherit;}

Or else you get bold text in many browsers, whose owners hate italics as
emphasis and use bold instead, since it makes things hard to read.

And, many text only browsers have different ideas on bold and italics and
emphasis.

And is it really convention of emphasizing ship names, or is it
convention of printing them with italics? I think it is the latter.
 
J

Joel Shepherd

Toby said:
<em class="ship">Harry S Truman</em> pulled out of Bremerton today.

<em> is more appropriate than <i>, because it conveys meaning to
non-visual browsers, and browser that otherwise do not support italic
typefaces.

I have to disagree. <em> is emphasis, and that is not the meaning
being conveyed in this case. The meaning is "this is the name of a
ship." Your objections to using <i> have merit, but whatever its
shortcomings, I don't think the right solution is to overload another
element which already has well-defined (and different) semantics.

Perhaps what HTML or (XHTML) needs is a <name> element, which could
then be styled appropriately.

(FWIW, what I actually do in practice is <i class="ship">, which makes
it a little clearer what's intended, and also makes it possible to
reasonably style exclamations like "<em><i
class="ship">Yamato</i>!</em>".)
 
N

Nick Theodorakis

On Mon, 14 Jul 2003 23:27:34 +0100, Toby A Inkster


[...]
I put it to you that italicising is merely a method of emphasis. Mr
Webster seems to agree with me:

[tai@ophelia (pts/3) ~]$ dict italics
1 definition found

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:

Italic \I*tal"ic\, n.; pl. {Italics}. (Print.)
An Italic letter, character, or type (see {Italic}, a., 2.);
-- often in the plural; as, the Italics are the author's.
Italic letters are used to distinguish words for emphasis,
importance, antithesis, etc. Also, collectively, Italic
letters.

I don't know about ship names, but for genus/species names, there is
no emphasis implied by italicizing. I guess that would go under "etc."

Nick
 
L

Lauri Raittila

I actually do this, but only specifying font-style. What is the
benefit to specifying font-weight:inherit, as opposed to not
specifying font-weight at all?

Well, with what do you expect people replace italics for emphasis? I
think most logical is bold. You could do same for colors too.
 
A

Andy Dingley

However, the <i> is still of not semantic.

<i> is semantic. A few hundred years of typographic convention have
given it this, in at least some cases.

It's not clear what the semantics are though ! There are several
valid instances where _italicisation_ is appropriate and other forms
of emphasis aren't, yet there's no easy way to distinguish them.

I'd hate to see widespread replacement of <i> with <em> (which is
more likely than <span class="linnaean-taxonomy-species" >) because
the binding between <em> and italic presentation is very loose. For
some examples, any presentation other than italics is _wrong_ (by
well-established conventions that aren't part of HTML).


I also have no problem with <small> and <big>. Their _usage_ isn't
clear, but the semantics are at least as valid as subscripts and
superscripts.
 
J

Joel Shepherd

Lauri said:
Well, with what do you expect people replace italics for emphasis? I
think most logical is bold. You could do same for colors too.

Sure, but could you not achieve the same by simply not specifying
font-weight (or -color) at all? I don't understand the difference
between omitting font-weight entirely, and using
"font-weight:inherit;": I was hoping you would clarify that.
 

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