Re: less than normal importance/emphasis

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 5:21 PM, Ian Hickson <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Apr 2008, Mikko Rantalainen wrote:

>> I'm still wondering if HTML5 should define an element for less than
>> normal importance or emphasis.

>> > On Thu, 3 Aug 2006, Jonathan Worent wrote:
>> If I have a sentence where the less important part is in the middle of
>> the sentence but the whole sentence is important, I would want to mark
>> up the whole sentence as a single element.

Agreed, but if the importance is decreased in the middle, than I think
the (greatest) importance probably attaches to separate spans smaller
than the full sentence.

[In response to requests for an example]

>> > On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Mikko Rantalainen wrote:

>> >> Example:
>> >>    <p>One should <em>never execute <code>rm -rf /</code>
>> >>    in a UNIX shell <dem>because doing so would remove
>> >>    everything in the system</dem></em>.</p>
>> >
>> > Why not:
>> >
>> >    <p>One should <strong>never execute <code>rm -rf /</code> in a UNIX
>> >    shell</strong> (because doing so would remove everything in the
>> >    system).</p>

>> For plain text case I agree that using the parenthesis is enough.
>> However, if the content is something else but just plain text (an
>> <object> for example) an element is required to mark up the semantics.

> This seems highly theoretical. Do you have a "real world" example in the
> wild showing this? (Ideally not something written by one of us.)

I would go farther and say that if you do want to decrease emphasis,
and parentheses are not sufficient, then you probably want to mark the
de-emphasized part in some other way as well.  The most likely ways
seem to be as <details>, as an <aside>, or whatever the convention for
<footnote> ends up being.

-jJ