b and i

[Lou Quillio]

On May 14, 2004, at 7:57 PM, Aaron Swartz wrote:

> tools like the original Wiki, Wikipedia, and Markdown make it easy to 
> use em and strong, and harder (or impossible) to use i, b, or any of 
> the other italic or bold elements.
>
> This is bad.

Sure is.  Textile solves it nicely:

_emphasis_
__italics__
*strong*
**bold**

As to whether bold and italics are inherently presentational and have 
no place in semantic XHTML, I'll submit the example of <br />.  By a 
certain logic, <br /> is purely presentational as well, and doesn't do 
anything that styled paragraphs can't.  Until you want to write poetry.

Call it representational semantics.  It's real.

LQ