Re: suggestions on how to markup quotes in article?

In article
<0adec0ef-1f2f-4114-9aa8-94bb94272b13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
mikael b <micke.bystrom@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Dec 17, 11:45 pm, dorayme <doraymeRidT...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> :

> The browser defaults are not just a "nice fallback".

Can you please explain what you mean with this? If I style for those
that don't override mine, how is the browser defaults anything else
but fallback?


You know the safety net that high wire trapeze artists use (at least in
practice sessions)? That is a kind of fall back. Nice to have. But they
can do without them! They are not essential to their act. In fact, a
missing fallback here enhances the brilliance of the act!

But in the case of structural mark up, if you take away author styles
and any default styles supplied by browsers, you are left with nothing
of practical significance at all. Styles are not just nice to have. They
are essential.

To say that a paragraph element has a meaning is to say that it is a
trigger to the browser to style the contents inside the tags to look or
sound or feel like a paragraph. It is no more than this, a stimulus to
style.

So, next time, anyone puts on a serious face and says how semantic HTML
is one thing and presentation is another, just remember that they may
just be parroting things they have not thought about, they may be
operating at an intuitive level, they may not know why semantic markup
is important or how it is linked to presentation. They may simply not
know that elements have meaning only insofar as they are flags or
triggers for presentation.


Are you saying there is something inherently bad with replacing header
browser default typography and margins in your styling or using css
layout techniques and, if CSS is inactivated for some reason, letting
a logical source order and browser default rendering or user style
rendering convey the meaning of content based on semantically rich
markup?


No, I am not saying anything like this. The very reverse! Browser
default rendering is the heart of what is left if CSS is "turned off".

I was saying that there has to be a style fallback, never mind if it is
nice, it has to be something that enables the meaning to get to humans.

This I agree with. Who doesn't agree with this?

There are those who talk as if an HTML element has a meaning and this
meaning is independent of presentation. I am just trying to show you
that it is in fact dependent and that without this dependence, there is
little sense in the idea of an HTML element having some "semantic"
property.

--
dorayme
.

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