On Sun, Jul 20, 2003 at 03:53:45AM +0100, James D. Forrester wrote:
On 20 Jul 2003 02:39, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
On Sun, Jul 20, 2003 at 02:18:30AM +0200, Timwi wrote:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
- using <i> not <em> 319 bytes saved
- using <b> not <strong> 1219 bytes saved
<em> and <strong> should be used, not <i> and <b>. The reasons are complicated and have to do with accessibility and text browsers. I don't really understand those reasons myself, but from my experience it seems to be consensus to use <em> and <strong>. I think <i> and <b> are even deprecated in the newest version of HTML, or something...
Wasting bytes where it's critical to make RC as small as possible for "complicated reasons" doesn't really convince me.
OK, I'll have a stab at this: the original concept of the <I> and <B> tags were to make the text they encapsulated italicised and emboldened, respectively.
What we want to say is exactly "this should be in italics", and "this should be in bold font", not "this should be emphasized", "this should be strongly emphasized". As what we want is exactly *font information*, we should be using font markup.
Just think for a moment - when read aloud it should be read the same way as the rest of text, not with any emphasis added
Anyway code style doesn't really matter here - we should use whatever results in smaller Recent Changes.
This is obviously a Bad Thing, as it implicitly promotes the (false) concept that HTML is a print mark-up language, as opposed to a text mark-up language, for display, printing, being read aloud, being encoded into light pulses, etc. This isn't really 'complicated' per se, it just requires people to understand the underlying philosophy of HTML.
Underlying philosophy is "primitive text display markup language later extended to support other media types, but not very good at it"
And a far more useful byte-stripper would be to install mod_gzip (or is this being used already?).
Completely unrelated.
And no, they're not deprecated in HTML 4.01.
To quote: "[These] elements specify font information. Although they are not [...] deprecated, their use is discouraged in favour of style sheets."
So, they are "something" similar to deprecated.
This is far from that. There's really no reason to use <span class='italics'> instead of <i>.