Re: [docbook-apps] Re: Including <b> and <i> in XHTML stylesheets

["Daniel Leidert" <Daniel.Leidert.Spam@gmx.net>]

Jirka Kosek wrote:
> Keith Fahlgren wrote:
> > As you've argued in the past, we don't have HTML5 stylsheets at this
> > time.  As for <b> & <i>, "their use is discouraged in favor of style
> > sheets." We already use strong and em for emphasis, so the remaining
> > font elements are purely presentational and make it more difficult to
> > style DocBook (X)HTML output using CSS.
> 
> Personally I don't care whether stylesheets will emit <b>/<i> or
> <strong>/<em>. But from CSS point of view these elements could be styled
> equally well.

Why? <b> and <i> are presentation markup. Of course you *can* style
<i> as bold and <b> as italic. But this is definitly not intentional.
Whereas <em> and <strong> are content markup and you can style them
in every way you want (JFTR: ditto for <s>/<strike> and <del>).

I would definitely prefer to have docbook-xsl output clean content
markup and leave any details of presentation up to the user. In my
experience, you can really concentrate on content markup (by using
container elements) without limiting styling/presentation possibilities.

> IMHO if you generate HTML from semantically rich markup as DocBook you
> are using HTML as purely presentational markup.

I disagree. Transforming from one to another format shouldn't remove
nor reduce the semantics. (X)HTML is a semantically rich markup too.
Keep the semantics in a clean markup and let the user care about the
presentation (of course provide ready-to-use templates, CSS files, ..).

I would like to point to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
I would prefer if docbook-xsl tries to follow these guidelines and
returns a widely useful and easily customizable (X)HTML output without
the need to write a large customization layer. For this every
presentational markup in the output should be removed.

Regards, Daniel
-- 
GRATIS für alle GMX-Mitglieder: Die maxdome Movie-FLAT!
Jetzt freischalten unter http://portal.gmx.net/de/go/maxdome01