On Sat, 30 Nov 2013 13:22:20 +0100, max max@koehler-kn.de wrote:
Speaking of semantic markup, what do you guys think about replacing the standard 'bold' and 'italic' buttons in the visual editor with a simple 'emphasis' button? In my opinion, that would help a lot with these kinds of problems. In my opinion, we should make authors think less about presentation (that's our job) and more about content.
It would also make authors raving mad, which is a reasonable reaction to having your editing tools taken away. VisualEditor already gets enough hate.
Many things are traditionally typographically marked in italics – quotes, song titles, regular mid-sentence emphasis, and I likely missed some – and Wikipedias have many rules about what to mark with emboldened text (article lead usually contains bold title of that article, various tables have bold headings, navboxes often use bold for content information). And last but not least, people simply *care how their work looks*.
Unless you're willing to replace it with 20 new "semantic" buttons, you can't kill the distinction between bold and italics.