On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 2:24 AM, Alex Brollo <alex.brollo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This question gives me the opportunity for a question
to experts about
server load. Is really so harder for the server to manage html tags like
<b>, </b>, <i>,</i> instead of usual wiki markup ''',
''?
No, it's much easier. <b> and <i> are handled in one pass with all
the other HTML elements, ''' and '' require their own horrible hacky
unpredictable pass in the parser. ''' and '' are intended to be more
user-friendly, not more robot-friendly. If we could kill them now,
I'd be all in favor, but it's way too late for that.
The former have a
great advantage since they are "well-formed tags"
They don't have to be well-formed. <b><i>Hi there!</b></i> is
"valid"
wiki markup, in that it will do what you want and nothing complains
about it. You can also omit closing tags.
(even if they are "deprecated html tags"),
<b> and <i> are not deprecated in any standard we care about.
while wiki markup is not at all; this would make
much simpler to manage them by some bot scripts. Sometimes I found almost
impossible to select markup aposthophes from text apostophes in Italian
texts by a script.
Yes, it's pretty terrible. Your only reliable bet is to
reverse-engineer doQuotes() from includes/parser/Parser.php. Although
of course that's run after various other passes are already done,
particularly preprocessing, so even then it won't be totally reliable.
On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 7:39 AM, Svip <svippy(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Which reminds me, why doesn't it translates into
<strong> and <em>
This is completely wrong. <b>/<i> originally meant "make this
bold/italic, for no particular reason". This is what people actually
mean when they type '' and ''', so pretending they necessarily want
emphasis is wrong. Wordpress does this -- they have buttons that look
like the bold/italic buttons from Word or whatnot, but actually create
<strong> and <em>. That defeats the entire point of using
<strong>/<em> instead of <b>/<i>. It's standards
cargo-culting.
or
better yet, <span style="font-weight: bold"> and <span
style="font-style: italic;"> ?
These have the exact same semantics as <b> and <i>, but are much
longer, so there's no point in any practical sense. We should try to
follow standards even if they don't make much sense (as long as
they're not too harmful), just to be supportive and pro-standards and
whatever. But we don't need to do stupid things that *aren't*
actually required by standards, and this isn't.
On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 9:19 AM, Svip <svippy(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Okay, correct, but it is 'discouraged'. They
even removed them in
XHTML 2.0, not that anyone uses that. Though, I don't think it is
going out of HTML5.
<b> and <i> are not deprecated or removed or discouraged in HTML5, or
in XHTML 1.0 Transitional, which are the standards we use. You can
read the HTML5 definitions at
<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/text-level-semantics.html#the-i-element>.
They're cleverly defined to be semantic elements whose semantics are
"whatever people use bold or italics for":
"The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or
mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose, such as a taxonomic
designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another
language, a thought, a ship name, or some other prose whose typical
typographic presentation is italicized."
"The b element represents a span of text to be stylistically offset
from the normal prose without conveying any extra importance, such as
key words in a document abstract, product names in a review, or other
spans of text whose typical typographic presentation is boldened."
See, it's semantic! :P The examples there (for both elements) do
highlight a lot of cases where you really do need bold or italics but
it's not for emphasis or anything else we have an actual tag for.
Using <span style="whatever"> in all those cases would be silly.
According to the HTML5 spec, authors SHOULD use (or are encouraged to
consider using) <b>/<i> only when there's no more suitable replacement
like <strong> or <em>. They MUST not use <strong> or <em> for
anything other than emphasis (see
<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/elements.html#semantics-0>).
But we can't enforce either of those at the software level, so it's
up to users to comply themselves. If they don't, we should at least
have them violate the SHOULD/"encouraged to consider" instead of the
MUST, if you want to do standards-lawyering.