Steve Bennett wrote:
On 6/24/06, Tels nospam-abuse@bloodgate.com wrote:
I didn't see that question. And even if it would be renamed, then we would now miss a way to tag poems as poems, and not as "something usefull including poems, cook recipes and whatever". :)
So, Use <poem> for poems, and invent something else for, well, something else :-D
Some more background on this <poem> tag would help. Are there any other instances where we have purely semantic tags?
You seem to be implying that you think we should only introduce purely semantic tags if we already have other semantic tags. You therefore seem to be of the opinion that unsemantic tags are favourable in a context where most mark-up is already unsemantic. But if this was the case, then surely HTML would not have introduced things like <em> and <strong> and deprecated things like <font>, and instead have introduced things like <marquee> or <blink>.
So, the reason <poem> was made a semantic tag is because semantic tags are good, independently of whether we already have semantic tags or not.
Imagine we use the same tag for poems and for cooking recipes. Some time in the future we decide we actually want the mark-up to behave slightly (or even completely) differently for recipes. This is why we need separate mark-up for separate purposes.
And yes, I know that ideally this reasoning also calls for separate mark-ups that are currently all handled with '' (emphasis, maths variables, song/film titles, etc.). Obviously in this situation it is futile to hope for the ideal. Doesn't mean we have to create the same suboptimal situation in something as rarely-used as poems, though.
Timwi