Scott Hudson wrote:
>> I agree about the need to provide UI features to choose variable,
>> etc. But that need is separate to how to handle the cases where a
>> user really does just want to do simple bolding and italicizing of
>> text.
I'm afraid it's a bit more of an either-or situation than we might like.
User interfaces have limited space, users have limited attention, and
developers have finite time. Putting in b and i and underline buttons at
best relegates the genuine semantic actions to a less obvious part of
the user interface, and at worst eliminates them completely. In the
middle it's very likely that users will just click the buttons and never
learn or use the semantic markup.
If that's what the users want that's fine, but then why are they using
DocBook in the first place?
In fact, the current scheme is even worse. It doesn't merely fail to
apply the correct semantics. It applies actively wrong and mesleading
semantics. A foreign word or a wordasword is not necessarily emphasized,
and it shouldn't be marked as such.
Putting i on an emphasis button is cargo cult markup. People have heard
the message that i is deprecated and they should use em instead. However
they don't understand why, so they just go ahead and use em wherever
they would have used i before, even when i is actually more appropriate.
WordPress has the same bug.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/
