On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
Parsers don't have to be single pass... and ours isn't now.
Is it?
Nope.
It is; I believe it renders as <strong>, not <bold>.
Nope. It used to render as <strong>, but it was used as <b>, so it was changed to output <b>. Dedication to semantic content includes the ability to recognize when content does *not* have semantic value, and use non-semantic tags. The "semantic web" is not people replacing <b> with <strong> and <s> with <del>, so that they aren't using deprecated markup; it's people using tags to add meaning to the content. If you aren't adding meaning, you shouldn't use semantic tags, and in practice, '' and ''' are not used in any way exclusively to denote emphasis, but rather to denote all sorts of things.
As a concrete example of this, people using screenreaders complained that all sorts of words would be incongruously emphasized (movie titles, loan words, you name it). Therefore, they were changed to the non-semantic <i> and <b>, which are typically not emphasized by screenreaders (although they may be by some).