February 2008
Internationalization Activity leader Richard Ishida comments on the
HTML 5 draft, The formerly deprecated b and i elements of HTML are defined in terms of their appearance: for example, the name of a ship can be bracketed with <i>…</i>, because ship names are italicized. The problem is, of course, that this applies to English, but not to Japanese, for example. Should these tags be suppressed in favour of something ‘more semantic’ (whatever that means)?
Read more
Mark Pilgrim reports that he’s been misusing the HTML cite element all these years because the HTML 5 definition contradicts his use of cite to wrap authors’ names. Just when I was about to crow excitedly that I’d always said he was wrong, I checked the old specs and discovered we both were—or actually, that HTML 4 was wrong.
Read more
There is some controversy over the proposal by the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 team to support a new header X-UA-Compatible in IE8. Leaving aside the argument as to whether this header should exist at all, there is the question of whether anyone at Microsoft has read RFC 2616 (the HTTP 1.1 specification) and spent as much as five minutes considering how to make their header fit in to the established conventions.
Read more
