ACTION re: HTML 3: Too many tags!

Ka-Ping Yee ([email protected])
Wed, 26 Jul 1995 04:32:01 -0400


A week ago, i wrote a message here lamenting the ridiculous proliferation
of easily-abusable tags[1, 2] in the proposed HTML 3.0 specification[3].

Aside from a discussion about whether <Q> actually has a distinct semantic
meaning then <BLOCKQUOTE>, responses generally agreed that most of the
other tags i mentioned were not necessary. Specifically, they are:

CODE KBD AU ACRONYM ABBREV INS DEL S U BIG SMALL

The above tags are unnecessary for reasons explained in [4] and summarized
at the end of this message.

To me, they are simply unacceptable. I would like to have them removed.

How can i go about accomplishing this (or finding adequate justification
for each and every one of them, which at the moment is sorely lacking)?

[1] http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html3/logical.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html3/emphasis.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html3/CoverPage.html
[4] http://gummo.stanford.edu/html/hypermail/www-html-1995q3/0280.html

Summary: why we don't need....
CODE, KBD: redundant. Use SAMP.
AU: too specific. apply attributes of all kinds to PERSON instead.
ACRONYM, ABBREV: redundant. Use DFN.
INS, DEL: too specific. apply attributes to P instead.
S, U, BIG, SMALL: purely presentational markup. doesn't belong in HTML.

and i still wonder about:
Q: too specific. are we going to mark up <PAREN>, <SENTENCE>, etc. also?

Ping (Ka-Ping Yee): 2B Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada
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