Re: *markup*, /markup/ and _markup_ true semantics [Was: Re: Ox-html: Replace <b> with <strong> and <i> with <em>]

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

On reading your response, we are probably not as far apart as I first
thought. However, we have now wondered into discussion which probably
isn't appropriate for this list. It is now in the realms of something
that would probably be better discussed with a good bottle of red or a
nice cold beer!

There is lots that is 'broken' with the web and I suspect much of it we
will just have to live with and hope whatever the next evolution brings
us learns from our mistakes.

Tim

Garreau, Alexandre <galex-713@galex-713.eu> writes:

> On 2018/10/27 at 07:15, Tim Cross wrote:
>> I have either misunderstood most of your position or I simply disagree
>> with it - I'm not sure which.
>
> maybe a mix of both? I hope it’s a misunderstandnment but if it’s not I
> want to understand too so to get to a constructive agreement.
>
>> - Much of what you argue seems to be based around ideas associated with
>>   typography. IMO this is where things fall down. Typography is really
>>   only relevant to 'printing' (either on paper or screen). Markup is not
>>   just about printing - it is about conveying what the author wanted and
>
> Indeed.  But many people do not abstract what they mean to write and
> still (often, poorly) think in terms of “italic” and “bold” (the org
> manual, as you later said, even do so).  What I wanted to underline is
> that both “italic” and “bold” (and underline too somewhat) are not just
> arbitrary display-level caracteristic that had the particularity to
> later get a meaning: *first* a *meaning* was wanted, and *then* they
> were invented as an imperfect, more or less good, way to translate these
> meanings or their intents to display (it’s as imperfect as a bitmap or
> handwriting of a circle, or a sampled and compressed audio, is to the
> bezier curve or equation of a circle which resulted in it, or the
> function that produced the audio (such as a LilyPond musical partition
> or a resulting MIDI file)).
>
> I’m willing to extract as much of the original meaning (be it about
> attention, memorization, structuration, etc. (very abstract cognitive
> human features are still more common than visual-recognition features))
> so it can be then better applied everywhere, without the burden and
> constraints of the original media (display), with a little of history
> because I like to rehistoricize things into their material and social
> background, so not to see them as a static, ahistoric, uncreated,
> uncriticizable, concept.  Concepts and tools are made for people to
> serve them, not the opposite.
>
>>   how that is best interpreted will depend on the media being used
>>   (i.e. how the content is 'rendered') and should largely be up to the
>>   consumer. 
>
> Yes totally, this is why I believe we, at best, should try to give clear
> and defined meaning to why do we use *, / and _-tags, rather than just
> translating them to the traditional <em>, <strong>, and <ins> tags, that
> were actually just a poor 1-to-1 wrapping to the old <i>, <b> and <u>
> tags, which had no meaning, and still have confused, complex and not
> backward-compatible meaning.
>
> And why sometimes it might be better to set up user options, so if
> authors disagree with what is meant by their tags, they can change it,
> so in the end that gives the correct semantic markup and everybody will
> get the same, intended, meaning.
>
> Also why, ideally, for the web, I wished server-side CSS never existed
> and we only used it as a user-customization language (but still most
> websites have poor semantic tagging, and complex tags composition have
> still no clear defined meaning so it the end it becomes either guessing,
> either a request to add yet-another tag to the already complex HTML
> spec).
>
>> - I am a screen reader user. While you are correct that pitch, tone,
>>   speed and different voices are often used to convey things like 'bold'
>>   or 'italic', there is no universally accepted rule for this
>>   interpretation, at least not in the same sense as there is with
>>   typography.
>
> I know, that’s why I wanted to check with Orca, NVDA, and maybe Jaws too
> if I could.
>
>>   We all know what bold or italic looks like, but there is no
>>   agreement as to what these should sound like. When you use Jaws, you
>>   will get a different result from when you use Orca or Emacspeak or
>>   Window Eyes or .... However, this shouldn't really matter - how
>>   these are 'rendered' should ideally be under the control of the
>>   individual consuming the content. When I consume a document, it
>>   should be my decision as to how the content is presented and for me,
>>   interpreting 'strong' or 'emphasis' seems to be far clearer than
>>   'bold' or 'italic'.
>
> That’s why I’d like * and / to get better meaning than bold and italic.
> For me it is already widely accepted that * is, sometimes, considered as
> bold, but more widely used for emphasis.  So it should be considered as
> such (and, personally, I’ve meant this so that it could begin rendering
> with italic on display for instance, or whatever is the favorite
> emphasis method of the user, it should be configurable).
>
> / is a way harder problem as it has been used because of its slanted
> appearance, to mean italic, so sometimes it’s used for emphasis,
> sometimes for other uses of emphasis.  Ideally I’d like to be acted it’s
> not for emphasis (it’s way less used and supported than * for it, and *
> already serves this purpose very well informally), so implementations
> derive some other meaning for it, to get richer semantics.
>
>> - I don't believe there is any strong reason that the markup used by org
>>   should have any strong reference to HTML in appearance. Org supports
>>   many different backends, many of which don't have anything to do with
>>   HTML at all. It is perhaps unfortunate that Org syntax and markdown
>>   are quite different (though I feel the unfortunate part is that
>>   markdown didn't follow org more closely as I much prefer Org's syntax
>>   to most markdown semantics).  
>
> I don’t like markdown either, nor ReStructuredText.  Why I talked a lot
> about HTML is for two reasons: the discussion was initially about it,
> and it is, afaik, the richest and most known semantical markup
> language.  It is *way* richer than LaTeX, org, md, rst, etc. maybe even
> odt and texinfo, but I’m unsure.
>
> However the * and / exports to texinfo with the same tags as html, that
> is respectively strong and emphasis, which I find sad as * is what is
> mostly used for emphasis (and too levels are pretty much not needed, why
> richer semantics could).  ODT seems to use “<span>” with “style-name="Emphasis"”: I
> heard ODT could be somewhat semantic, but I don’t know if that the best
> they can do (maybe this “style-name” has standard semantics? because to
> me styling is for presentation, and tagging for semantics).
>
> Also a problem of many backends is they’re made for printing or less
> semantic: pdf is not made for semantics, although I heard somewhere that
> they were trial to make it so (which sounds silly as it is tailored for
> printing and supports almost no dynamic modifications, it would be
> better to stop using PDFs at all, in, eg, administration).
>
>> - Probably the number 1 issue I come across when dealing with markup is
>>   the expectation too many authors have that things will be rendered in
>>   the browser in a specific way (a particular font, colour, position,
>>   size, etc). This is a mistake. The big advantage of electronic
>>   presentation is that for the first time, the consumer can have control
>>   over the presentation - they can customise it to meet their
>>   requirements or preferences.
>
> *Exactely*.  Except that then, web become commercial, and businesses
> have found it especially good way to control what users saw almost as
> fully as in advertisements (so it can bring control, power to them, and
> also money, secondarily (if they use non-semantic tags and only <div>
> and <span> in awfully complex sgml soup, then no user is able to control
> anything)), just as French minitel would, and they begun first to abuse
> display-level tagging, then to abuse CSS and html-style-soup (full of
> 80% of <div> and <span>, and enormous CSSes, yay! what a progress!  …><
> yet now we have worse: less CSS, less “style”, and more “data-*” and
> non-free surveillance javascript to replace them).
>
>>   The problem with <b> and <i> is that it gives authors an expectation
>>   their content will be rendered in a specific way.
>
> Not anymore, since W3C, somewhat breaking backward-compatibility,
> decided <b> is for “keywords” without special emphasis, and not being a
> definition (there’s already <dfn> afaik for that), and <i> is for
> ”differently-pronounced phrasing content”, without emphasis, such as
> text prounced with a tone of disgust, or foreign-language text (so if
> you want to embed french words not used enough to be in english
> dictionary, and if it’s nor a real quotation (<q lang="fr>), you should
> use <i lang="fr">du texte en française</i>).
>
> So I can theorically decide that any word markuped <b> may compose a
> local list of easily reachable (for instance with keystrokes)
> “keywords”, like lynx, that b should be displayed normally, but in blue,
> and that would be a standard-complying www user-agent.
>
>>   Some may argue that the author should be able to control how their
>>   content is rendered. I think this is misleading because unlike
>>   printed material, the author has no control over the presentation
>>   media - they don't know how large the screen is, what the
>>   capabilities of the screen is, what fonts are installed
>>   etc. Therefore, tags which focus on meaning i.e. I want this to
>>   stand out or I want this to be emphasised are clearer than tags
>>   which say to make this bold or make this italic.
>
> Yes they can: they can require you server-side connecting from a local
> network on computers furnished by the organization of the place (already
> saw that), while checking what do you do and how to make you doing it
> client-side with proprietary javascript, or even to have a tablet with
> retina screen with a such range of screen sizes, on iOS… and… btw… this
> already exists, there’s an app for it: AppStore (GooglePlay too): they
> furnish HTML/CSS UI, controled by proprietary software, only distributed
> for their devices, theorically only working on those (at least the apps
> are developed, configured, and tested so).  And afaik developers don’t
> mind making their software more usable with TalkBack (I don’t even know
> if there’s a such thing for iOS).
>
> The excuse of “the device is not always the same” is to me a weak one:
> this can, with special political and commercial restrictions, be
> lowered, and then it could be considered a “reasonable workaround”
> (while this is not).  What should be advertised is it breaks
> accessibility, don’t comply standard, will certainly break
> forward-compatibility, legally-mandatory interoperability, and, as for
> proprietary software, gives power to authors (or, more often but not
> always, companies) and deprive users of what they could and should
> have.  This power is comparable to what power is gained through
> advertisements, propaganda.
>
>
>> The debate over <i>, <b>, <strong> and <em> is likely to continue for
>> some years yet.  I do think things are moving towards <strong>/<em>
>> and nearly everything I read these days recommends these over <i> and
>> <b>.
>
> There are companies (and some individual, or countries) who gain power
> by doing so, just as they can do by pushing proprietary software (yet on
> a different level), so I don’t believe they will ever stop doing
> anything equivalent.  Nor advertise they would do so.
>
> So this is not a debate.  Like there is no “free vs proprietary” debate,
> or “climate change vs this-is-god/a-myth” debate: the advocate of the
> first have arguments and facts, the actors of the second are either
> stating their ennemies are idealist, stating their goal are
> unrealizable, or they “do so because they have no choice”, or “do their
> best not harm”, and then push more and more pervasive and unadvertised
> way of harming, such as DRM and proprietary javascript, or, in our case,
> use sometimes <em> and <strong>, but allow users to publish content
> using <b> and <i> (and colors!!!), and making their whole website a soup
> of <div> and <span>, heavily relying on a gigantic style soup, based on
> a site-specific CSS stylesheet, that will be partially generated
> server-side, partially heavily “improve” (that is: depend upon)
> proprietary javascript.
>
> Btw, this is what Google does.  And Google is quite evidently the
> biggest feudal lord on the Web.
>
>> It is pretty well accepted that XHTML was a mistake and HTML5 goes a
>> long way to address the issues introduced with XHTML - I think XHTML
>> as a standard is pretty much relegated to an evolutionary dead end.
>
> XHTML was a beautiful standard and was dismissed because all the money
> and resources were placed on HTML5, whose main selling point was new
> media resources (namely <audio> and <video>) and new sensors/multimedia
> API for javascript.  So that hopefully killed flash, java, and almost
> silverlight (which had its niche anyway), and replaced it with
> proprietary obfusced javascript and DRM.  The only evolution is we have
> free softwares to execute it, hence we may have better time
> reverse-engineering and hacking it.
>
> XHTML was a dead end not because evolution, but because, from what I
> heard, it was pretty much, as XML compared to SGML, something promoted
> by academics, IA/semiology (study of semantics) researchers and
> universities (the same who made XPath, RDF, XML Schemas, DTD, SPARQL,
> SQL predecessors, logical languages, etc.), so to make the whole thing
> more extensible, modular, and factorized.  For instance, the fact of
> embedding MathML (semantic markuping for maths language), instead of
> using images (TeX-generated, of course) to display formulas, come from
> XHTML, and doing that in HTML5 is called “XHTML5”.  Same for SVG.  Same
> for XLinks (more powerful than HTML hyperlinking facilities, more near
> to what was originally meant for first-browser HTML links (dual-end
> links, multi-links, etc.), hence more semantic, and currently, as a
> small subset, used in SVG and ODT to mark link.
>
> XHTML was a great step toward semantics actually, and its death is
> extremely sad, even for semantics.
>
> But, nowadays, though they’re member as well, just as Mozilla, we know
> now W3C is ran by Netflix, BBC, and other displayfull DRM companies.  So
> HTML5 won over XHTML, because XML, pure logics, and semiology (what made
> “semantic” stuff possible at all) do not interest these companies.
> Codec-supports and DRM do.
>
>> I do agree <div> is over used. In particular, HTML5 has a number of
>> new tags which should be used to convey document structure which would
>> be a better choice than <div> with different 'class' attributes.
>
> XHTML2 had those, too (not all yet), before to be killed by HTML5.
> Also, not only new elements, but combinations of those, can be used to
> replace “style”.  For instance, “article article” CSS selector refers to
> what HTML specs call a “comment” (and “article > footer:first-child” is
> what we call in mail a “header”: it contains secondary metadata).  But
> currently, everywhere in the web, comments do not always use the
> “article” tag, or always are outside the commented article tag, and use
> a special non-standard css style to mark them.
>
> Note this is a non-standard, opaque and almost proprietary format: it’s
> not patented, it’s not copyrighted, but its implementation (either CSS
> or proprietary javascript) most of time is.  It’s not binary, it is
> based on a cleartext format, but obfuscated, and unlike what cleartext
> advocated have said, way more impossible to reverse-engineer than a
> single binary format: easily guessable, of course, but just like a
> binary format is difficult and take time to make, a text-format is easy
> and quick to make, so there are *millions* of them, at least one per
> website, and nobody will ever be able to reverse engineer that (unlike
> binary formats which are fewer).
>
>> However, we will continue to see a lot of div tags, even when authors
>> begin to use newer tags - at least it is a lot better than the early
>> days when everything was stuck inside tables!
>
> Ah the old days… now they’ve got css-level tables.  But they still need
> a div tag soup for it, instead of advanced selectors, so they keep
> complexifying the (X)HTML, and making it bloated and unreadable.
>
> Instead, in XML, we had DSSSL (inspired from scheme) and XSLT
> (turing-complete, purely functional, XML syntax) to transform it in
> display level things: you *never* need to change the XHTML, only your
> stylesheet will get more complex as your display becomes more complex,
> and you can do *anything* with your initial, semantics tags.
>
> But now XHTML is dead, this kind of powerfulness is to reserve for
> LaTeX3, lisp, and such.
>
>> Backends which generate HTML should be generating HTML5 compliant
>> output if for no other reason than it is clearer and easier than
>> XHTML.
>
> XHTML allows embedding content and using more semantic markup.  For
> instance it could allow using MathML for math equations (a lot used in
> org, though through AMSLaTeX syntax), instead of, in org-mode export,
> currently used MathJAX, relying on javascript and display-level CSS.
>
>> As to the OP's original question regarding changing <b> and <i> in HTML
>> backends - while I would vote for strong/em over b/i, I don't think
>> there is any real need to do this, certainly not in the short term. As
>> was pointed out b/i has not been deprecated, so it is still valid. There
>> is no suggestion to change Org's own internal markup (ironically
>> referred to as bold and italic!), so overall, the status quo seems fine.
>
> I believe we should begin making it semantic, as for
> forward-compatibility, and it is always better to break backward-compat,
> or introduce new specs the sooner as possible, because as the
> implementation gets more widely used, the burden to change it
> incompatibly increases as well.


-- 
Tim Cross