Does it take a geek....

[killingtime]

Originally Posted by David Franklin

Do you have an actual cite that <i> is being removed? (It's not that I doubt you, but I'd like to see the official reasoning). I had a look on W3C, the (draft) spec for HTML 5 still has <i> in there:

It is obsolete in XHTML 2.0 Standard however it doesn't appear to be deprecated in XHTML 1.1 as I originally assumed. HTML 5 is a bit of a throw back for the W3C as XHTML 1.0 was designed to entirely supersede it; I think the prevalence of AJAX was part of that.

Originally Posted by David Franklin

And my understanding is that it would have to be made obsolete in order for browsers to stop supporting it.

I doubt you'll ever see browsers stop supporting it. Even if we did all move to XHTML 2.0 they'd probably still keep previous HTML and XHTML backwards compatibility in there.

Originally Posted by David Franklin

In my experience, I know a lot more people who understand BBCode than people who understand HTML, so that's a bit of a problem for anyone wanting to deprecate <i>. That is, they are saying "I want this in italics", not "I want this emphasized", so something that parses [i] into <em> is actually causing semantic confusion, not helping it.

Well that's not really a problem. The back end, it would be argued, would probably just give it a <span class="bb_italic"> with the relevant stylesheet. Even Tim Berners-Lee stated that he never actually imagined people hand rolling the code and that's probably the way it should be, if BBCode is a more accessible level then who, other than the developer, cares how the transformation of that code is done?

Originally Posted by David Franklin

Far better, in my mind, to persuade people to use <em> for emphasis which I agree makes sense, but let them still use <i> when they simply want italics.

I think the ideology behind all the "futurist" web development is to separate the semantic markup entirely from the rendering. As <i> is considered a rendering instruction then it's been removed. Of course I'd be happy to argue along side you that <i>italics</i> is much more meaningful than <span class="some_random_css_class_that_makes_italics">i talics</span> is to both a human and a machine.

There is a good summary article of XHTML 2.0 on IBM's website.

[Beowulf]

Originally Posted by Twirly

Can't we just have more cute kitten pictures please?!

Your wish... (actually I know you could just go there and visit yourself..but I particularly liked these few)







this next one had me choking with tears of laughter.. perhaps it's the Thespian in me that liked it so much. (ok so it's NOT a cat!!)

[David Franklin]

Originally Posted by killingtime

It is obsolete in XHTML 2.0 Standard however it doesn't appear to be deprecated in XHTML 1.1 as I originally assumed. HTML 5 is a bit of a throw back for the W3C as XHTML 1.0 was designed to entirely supersede it.

I confess I wasn't aware of that - I thought XHTML was supposed to be a parallel/augmented standard, not a replacement.

I doubt you'll ever see browsers stop supporting it. Even if we did all move to XHTML 2.0 they'd probably still keep previous HTML and XHTML backwards compatibility in there.

Without excessively prolonging the discussion (and boy, have we confirmed the 'geek' question with these posts!), looking at the XHTML spec I think it pretty unthinkable it will replace HTML anytime soon. It's the "hand-rolling" thing you mention: I think being able to hand-roll HTML by hand is still very important, and it seems to me far more difficult to do that with XHTML.

Thanks for the informative post though - lots of stuff I didn't know...

[ducasi]

Originally Posted by ducasi

Shouldn't you be using Catscading Style Sheets?

Was the Catscading Styles Sheets quip too subtle, or did just no-one find it funny?

[killingtime]

Originally Posted by ducasi

Was the Catscading Styles Sheets quip too subtle, or did just no-one find it funny?

Totally missed it, sorry.

Originally Posted by David Franklin

I confess I wasn't aware of that - I thought XHTML was supposed to be a parallel/augmented standard, not a replacement.

Obviously not the only one as HTML 4.0 was the last one... and here's the fifth version . Basically they took HTML and orphaned it from SGML and re-hammered it into XML for XHTML 1.0. XHTML 2.0 is the first one the seriously branches from the way HTML used to look; and I think they are going to have a tough time convincing Mozilla and Opera to even think about supporting it; let alone Microsoft.

[straycat]

Originally Posted by Twirly

Can't we just have more cute kitten pictures please?!

If you insist...

[Twirly]

Originally Posted by Beowulf

Your wish... (actually I know you could just go there and visit yourself..but I particularly liked these few)

Originally Posted by straycat264

If you insist...

Aw, very cute, thanks guys