Re: [dita] Proposal 13031: Add Line-Through

[Richard Hamilton <hamilton@xmlpress.net>]

I'm concerned that we're straying into a gray area with some of this discussion about strike through.

Even though I'm a "strict constructionist" when it comes to semantic markup (must be my DocBook roots:), I do understand the usefulness of a highlighting domain. If nothing else, it helps you avoid some of the egregious tag abuse that I'm sure most of us have witnessed (if not perpetrated ourselves). I also like the idea that if you're going to have representation markup, it should be called out as such and kept separate.

However, in the discussion today about strikethrough and revision markup, we blurred the line between representational and semantic markup.

Yes, strikethrough is typically used to show deletions in revision markup, but from a markup point of view, there is no more connection between strikethrough and revision markup than there is between italics and the <var> element.

My hope is that we make sure that in creating revision/correction markup we avoid anything that ties the markup to a particular representation, and that in extending the highlighting domain (and possibly creating a formatting domain) we avoid suggesting that elements in those domains are the preferred way to represent revision/correction markup (or any other kind of semantic markup).

Best Regards,
Richard Hamilton
-------
XML Press
XML for Technical Communicators
http://xmlpress.net
hamilton@xmlpress.net