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Re: Question: inlne headings

for

From: Bourne, Sarah (ITD)
Date: Aug 22, 2013 7:15AM

Bevi,

I feel your pain! Many of these boil down to an imperfect separation of presentation and content.

All platforms assume that headings need to not share a line with other chunks of content. Why? Because that's what we've done in print - for visual users - forever. Except some circumstances, such as bulleted (or numbered) lists of text blocks where the heading is immediately followed by text - again, a typographic convention to aid visual users. It seems that we should be able to override this kind of presentation style to accommodate exceptions.

There's been so much debate over so many years about the use of bold and italics. The problem is that we use them for a variety of very different reasons. Some, like calling out words that appear in a glossary (often presented in bold) or indicating a different language (often presented in italics) have mark-up that can be used. Others not so much: calling out the names of people by making them bold, putting the titles of books (as in footnotes and bibliographies) in italics. Yeah, they fit under the umbrella of "emphasis", but there are reasons for the emphasis that cannot be expressed.

Of course, trying to add new tags for every little thing would certainly be paving the road to hell. But it's always struck me as silly to change <b> and <i> to <strong> and <em> just to make them seem semantic, without providing a way to better indicate the reason for the change in typography.

sb
Sarah E. Bourne
Director of Assistive Technology &
Mass.Gov Chief Technology Strategist
Information Technology Division
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
1 Ashburton Pl. rm 1601 Boston MA 02108
617-626-4502
<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://www.mass.gov/itd