Re: [PATCH] syntax: html: remove the special highlighting of the b, i, and u elements

On Thu, Dec 29, 2022 at 6:11 AM Benno Schulenberg <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't see any harm in coloring them specially, because in
> the vast majority of cases, <b> will bold, <i> will italicize, and <u>
> will underline.

That's true, but I can't see why HTML developers should care about
that. Usually, <strong> will also bold, but <strong> and <b> have
different meanings, and best practice is to focus on meaning: the HTML
standard says that "HTML conveys meaning, rather than presentation
[1]". The harm is that the focus is shifted from meaning to
presentation when some tags are colored specially because they usually
have a presentational effect. Also, because I think the tags stand out
for no good reason, I'm distracted by them.

> Furthermore, both Vim and Emacs will /do/ those things
> to the text between a <b>|<i>|<u> tag and its corresponding closing tag.

I dislike this because it emphasizes presentation even more and the
text won't necessarily be presented the same way in the browser.

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/dom.html#semantics-2