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Re: Semantic markup vs CSS styling for emphasis

for

From: jeff newman
Date: Aug 6, 2003 10:23AM


Oh, they're just very ephemeral ideas and untested concerns.

Your point about blind users is very well taken and should be a priority.
I'm also not sure how an aurel stylesheet would handle this.

There's also the consideration of future changes. If your create and
maintain the site, and will for all time, then you can pretty much do as
you please. If someone else will be maintaining it they will need to know
all of the little "liberties" that you took with your mark-up.

My other concern deals with browsers that can't deal with style sheets at
all. I'm pretty sure that every browser can handle <b>, <em>, and <strong>
with ease, but a browser that wasn't designed for CSS would just dump the
rule all together and leave your text unstyled and unemphasized. Granted,
these browsers are rare, but they tend to be the type of browsers most used
in developping nations, etc.

j.

On Wed, 6 Aug 2003 17:04:36 +0100, Mark Fletcher <mark-
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Hi Jeff,
>
> Please find my reply comments inline.
>
>
>> I do agree that it would remove the structural meaning of the mark-up.
> I'm
>> not sure if this would be penalized in anway, i.e. lower ranking in
>> search
>> engines.
>
> No, but it could prevent say blind users being able to locate the
> emphasized
> text though, right?
>>
>> My natural instinct, as has been expressed by others is to use the
>> appropriate tags wherever possible and then pretty them up using CSS. I
>> can think of a couple of examples where getting a CSS tag to perform a
>> function already available in a standard HTML tag could lead to problems
>> down the road.
>
> That sounds very interesting, could you possibly expand upon this, that
> would really help?
>>
>> But then again, it all depends on what you're hoping to accomplish,
>> right?
>
> Yes, of course.
>
> I really appreciate you helping me with these questions.
>
> Cheers
> Mark
>


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