Mastodawn

Chris Scobell Jan 12, 2023

wait did they really retcon <b> as the "bring attention to" element lol https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/b

<b>: The Bring Attention To element - HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN

The <b> HTML element is used to draw the reader's attention to the element's contents, which are not otherwise granted special importance. This was formerly known as the Boldface element, and most browsers still draw the text in boldface. However, you should not use <b> for styling text or granting importance. If you wish to create boldface text, you should use the CSS font-weight property. If you wish to indicate an element is of special importance, you should use the <strong> element.

MDN Web Docs

allison Jan 11, 2023

in conclusion, make computer science students read johanna drucker

eli_oat Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish one of the best pull requests against code I wrote was a prolonged comment about how inappropriate it was that I included some comment that made reference to "someone you call Martin Buber."

Matthew McVickar Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish 👀 What you recommend for someone’s first Johanna Drucker book?

allison Jan 11, 2023

@matthewmcvickar I have only ever read _The Visible Word_ (which is fantastic) but I assign https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13534640903208834 in my classes to great effect (the PDF specifically—the HTML conversion messes up the whole argument haha)

Entity to Event: From Literal, Mechanistic Materiality to Probabilistic Materiality

Published in Parallax (Vol. 15, No. 4, 2009)

Taylor & Francis

Matthew McVickar Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish This looks great. Thank you!

Its Gregory Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish and player a music instrument other than drums !

tim 🍓Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish the "built different" element

dynamic Jan 11, 2023

Dislike!

Kip Manley Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish Stares in oh-come-the-flippin-heck-ON

David Renshaw Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish bold move

Marissa Cummings 吳至佳 Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish I don't hate this because it's emphasizing the semantic purpose separate from the formatting, which makes sense.

allison Jan 11, 2023

@marissaccc I disagree—bold text has its own semantics, by virtue simply of being in bold type, that is understood in a particular historical and social context. which is why, I think, they didn't just deprecate this tag (like they did with other "purely" style-based tags, like <tt>). I think that separating content and layout is very useful in many situations, but it's not some holy virtue to be pursued at any cost

brennen Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish @marissaccc the realization that there really is not and probably cannot be a pure distinction between something called "content" and something called "form" would have saved me personally and (i suspect) civilization as a whole a lot of misdirected effort if it had showed up sometime in my teenaged years.

Dan Seaman Jan 11, 2023

@brennen @aparrish @marissaccc the medium is the message

Marissa Cummings 吳至佳 Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish I don't disagree with at all, but at the same time I think they are trying to discourage people from using <b> for styling instead of CSS, and I like that this draws attention to the correct usage.

But maybe it just makes things more confusing. 🤷

Erin Kissane Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish actual horrible lol

Bobby Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish Oh, the <peacocking> element.

Cameo Wood Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish That's awesome and hilarious.

Cameo Wood Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish Perhaps we can pretend <blink> was always meant to identify the reader's eyes closing and the website responding to that.

Chris Silverman 🌻Jan 11, 2023

@Cameo @aparrish ah, you mean the wonderful new "bold/linked/interactive; not known" tag, for semantically indicating when something is visually distinctive but in a way that's left to the author

@aparrish *checks date* wait it's not April

Chris Silverman 🌻Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish so it's just a semantics-only version of `strong`? Good grief.
This sounds like the result of a three-hour meeting comprised primarily of people who get into heavily pedantic flamewars on Hacker News.

Comfortably Numb Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish lmao <i> is "Idiomatic text element" now https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/i

<i>: The Idiomatic Text element - HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN

The <i> HTML element represents a range of text that is set off from the normal text for some reason, such as idiomatic text, technical terms, taxonomical designations, among others. Historically, these have been presented using italicized type, which is the original source of the <i> naming of this element.

Jørgen Arnor G. Lom Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish Also introducing <marquee>: The “Motionless And Relatively Quiet Unusual Expression Element”-element.

Charlie Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish ..... wot? It's not April yet, what are they up to?

Θ Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish wasn't that what... em(phasis) was for

MOVED to @[email protected]Jan 11, 2023

@kescher @aparrish yeah but that one is italic
what about strong you ask? well, uh, look, behind you, an unicorn!

Haelwenn /элвэн/

@chjara @kescher @aparrish Nah, italic is <i> but don't say this too often, some webdevs abuse it for their font-based icons.

<b> and <i> are original gang.
<strong> and <em> are more like semantic-web and effectively makes no sense to have. Even if you consider speech synthesis because they didn't add other semantics that one can have with italics, like say latin words or phonetics.

arevbunhdowohop

artistsAgainstMastodonDotArt

@lanodan @kescher @aparrish @chjara

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/i
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/u

<i>: The Idiomatic Text element - HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN

The <i> HTML element represents a range of text that is set off from the normal text for some reason, such as idiomatic text, technical terms, taxonomical designations, among others. Historically, these have been presented using italicized type, which is the original source of the <i> naming of this element.

Haelwenn /элвэн/

@tusooa @kescher @aparrish @chjara Your point being?

(I know the W3C and WHATWG documents, MDN less so because it's a pain to browse)

arevbunhdowohop

artistsAgainstMastodonDotArt

@lanodan @kescher @aparrish @chjara meaning in html5 there exists no more pure styling tags like "bold" or "italics", and styles are to be defined in stylesheets

Haelwenn /элвэн/

@tusooa @kescher @aparrish @chjara Original gang being pre-WHATWG/HTML5.

@aparrish wait... What?! 😄

Not a Spring Onion Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish I guess the <blink> tag was deprecated because they don't feel comfortable with "bring attention to this link" anymore. /s

mcc Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish i have strong feelings about this

Gadfly (-booq-)Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish *gritting my teeth and tying my hands fast to the ship's wheel while shouting into the gale-force winds as I Commit to The Bit no matter what storms may come* "SEMANTIC!! HTML!!!"

samir, a terminally deprecated method Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish Oh my goodness. <i> is now “idiomatic text”. This is… remarkable. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/i

<i>: The Idiomatic Text element - HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN

The <i> HTML element represents a range of text that is set off from the normal text for some reason, such as idiomatic text, technical terms, taxonomical designations, among others. Historically, these have been presented using italicized type, which is the original source of the <i> naming of this element.

Nick Morgan Jan 11, 2023

@samir @aparrish what about the “brings limited interest notification kick” tag

Nick Morgan Jan 11, 2023

@samir @aparrish (this could use some workshopping)

samir, a terminally deprecated method Jan 11, 2023

@skilldrick Mozilla could do some serious fundraising with this. I'd pay good money for `<s>` to be renamed from "Strikethrough" to "Samir is embarassed they ever wrote this, plz ignore".

nev Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish ah yes, the HTML equivalent of replacing the first letter of a word with 🅱️

<🅱️>

nev Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish @suricrasia blackle put this in your iceberg

Dani — MLT(ASCP)Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish
They did NOT. Who the hell was responsible for this mess? Good Christ.

Dani — MLT(ASCP)Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish
Have you seen the W3 Consortium's blurb for it?

The b element represents a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian purposes without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of an alternate voice or mood, such as key words in a document abstract, product names in a review, actionable words in interactive text-driven software, or an article lede.

Matt Schneider Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish from now on I’m only using <span> with inline styling and onclick to do the job of every other tag

Dan Seaman Jan 11, 2023

@mattlaschneider @aparrish

Patrick H. Lauke Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish well, they did need some kind of retroactive way of justifying <b>'s existence somehow without also cutting into what is meant to be <strong> (under the assumption that "people will have used <b> for things other than strong emphasis, but we can't quite articulate what, and no it wasn't *just* for presentation purposes alone)"

XorOwl Jan 11, 2023

flere-imsaho 🇺🇦Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish bold move.

dakkar Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish years ago, during the initial design of perl6/raku, u/i/b were given "semantic" explanations:

* U → Unusual
* I → Important
* B → Basis / focus

they didn't stick…

Synopsis 26 - Documentation

Jochie 👨🏻‍💻🏳️‍🌈Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish That’s… bold

Halldór AS Jan 11, 2023

"Do not confuse the <b> element with the <strong>, <em>, or <mark> elements. The <strong> element represents text of certain importance, <em> puts some emphasis on the text and the <mark> element represents text of certain relevance. The <b> element doesn't convey such special semantic information; use it only when no others fit."

Glad they cleared all that up.

Les Orchard Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish Oh, huh, looks like this edit happened at least a few years ago in the before-git times for MDN 🙃

https://github.com/mdn/content/blame/main/files/en-us/web/html/element/b/index.md

GitHub - mdn/content: The official source for MDN Web Docs content. Home to over 14,000 pages of documentation about HTML, CSS, JS, HTTP, Web APIs, and more.

The official source for MDN Web Docs content. Home to over 14,000 pages of documentation about HTML, CSS, JS, HTTP, Web APIs, and more. - mdn/content

GitHub

Les Orchard Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish Since I worked on MDN at one point, now I feel nerd-sniped. I think the history log has been lost to time, but seems to have been edited to say this back in late 2017 / early 2018

https://web.archive.org/web/20171119170827/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/b

https://web.archive.org/web/20180206013708/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/b

<b>

The HTML b element represents a span of text stylistically different from normal text, without conveying any special importance or relevance, and that is typically rendered in boldface.

Mozilla Developer Network

Richard "RichiH" Hartmann Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish that's bold...

@aparrish @SwiftOnSecurity Devil's advocate: With accessibility concerns, and also the desire to use CSS to define visual layout instead of the markup itself, it does make sense to decouple "bold" from "this should stand out".

gulfie official Jan 11, 2023

@Elbrar @aparrish @SwiftOnSecurity bold already means that though

@Gulfie @aparrish @SwiftOnSecurity Bold is a visual representation of that. The whole point is disconnecting the visual representation from the meaning of the markup itself, because there might not *be* a visual representation (e.g. screen reader).

jsled Jan 11, 2023

@aparrish Wait till you see how <i> and <u> are defined…

> The u element represents a span of text with an unarticulated, though explicitly rendered, non-textual annotation, such as labeling the text as being a proper name in Chinese text (a Chinese proper name mark), or labeling the text as being misspelt.

— https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/text-level-semantics.html#the-u-element

HTML Standard