Re: less than normal importance/emphasis

"Jim Jewett" <[email protected]> Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:51:38 -0500
Newsgroups gmane.comp.web.html.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 5:34 PM, David Woolley
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Ian Hickson wrote:

>> I disagree. People already use <small>, <b>, and <i> in media-independent
>> ways, so it makes sense to "pave the cowpath" and spec it.

> These are culture specific, at least for smaller text, and probably for
> italics.  Simplified Chinese books use smaller print to indicate positive
> emphasis of material that the author wants to be read, even if in Western
> usage it means text that the author would rather not have included but the
> lawyers say must be sufficiently present that they can pretend that the
> reader will always read it.

In other words, Chinese web pages may be mis-using <small> in a
presentational manner the same way that English pages mis-use <b> or
<font>.

Is this common enough (and sufficiently different from the
"small-print is technically supposed to be important" case) that pages
would break because of the re-definition?

-jJ