Don’t fall into the trap of using fieldset for non-form elements. This is meant for grouping forms, nothing else.

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Don’t fall into the trap of using fieldset for non-form elements. This is meant for grouping form elements, nothing else.

Many of the debates about your list stem from the history of the tags themselves.

HTML is derived from IBM’s progression of typesetting languages, starting with GML (Generalized Markup Language), to BookManager, to SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), and then cut down to the relative few HTML tags.

Full typesetting languages can control content meaning in whatever presentation space desired with the thousands of tags available.

The SUB/SUP tags (and many others) were fought over for years, but they managed to live through committee when they should not have.

CSS is finally “fixing” this heritage of typesetting origin, by separating content and presentation spaces, but content meaning should never be allowed to be altered by any use of tags to “pretty up” the content itself.

Using crippled tags in the manner originally designed, without the support required from surrounding tags and attributes of a full typesetting environment can only lead to frustration…

(I know about the frustration part quiet well, I was there…)

Again, great work…

William…

The superscriptness of the 2 in x2 is part of the content. You could alternatively render it as x^2, in the same way that instead of using [strong] you could wrap text in *asterisks*, but that is not making full use of what HTML has available.
The subscriptness of the 2 in, for example, H2O is again important to the chemical formula. I don’t accept that it is purely presentational, and it is a big waste of bytes to define a class to be sub/superscript and then wrap all those digits in a span, when there are perfectly good [sub] and [sup] elements.
We don’t need [big] because we have [strong], [em] and [h1/2/3/4/5/6] to cover the different reasons to emphasise text. Apart from [small], there is no way to de-emphasise text, so I’m happy to use it for that purpose. As it appears are the HTML5 working group (not that that is necessarily a recommentation!)

About Sup and Sub: I’m starting to agree. Since this article was written, I’ve slowly changed my mind on them. Sure you can never know what you mean by them (power of, variable index, pure presentation, and so on), but hopefully the context tells you that. In something that looks like a formula, you do know that Sup is always the power of.

Thanks for the compliment about the photo ;) and even more thanks for the good content.

And I looked at your example with a SPAN with the class of “powerof” in order to convey the meaning of SUP but I don’t quite follow, since that would be like having a SPAN with the class “paragraph” instead of P. I agree that SUP can mean a lot, depending on context, but some elements are like that. They are not precise, nor perfect, but they are there, for a reason. I understand how you think about presentation but I don’t think it apply here. Hm… think of it this way: STRONG renders most often with a high boldness because that is how it looks in your head, that is, it is perceived more clearly than the rest. But it has semantic meaning while having a clear sense of how it is rendered. As do SUP and SUB because that is how they look and give meaning. A screen reader (I don’t know if those support the elements but bear with me) wouldn’t look at SPAN as something with semantic meaning (since it shall have none) but SUP and SUB should, just like STRONG.

By the way, your new photo looks really good (don’t remember the old one though).

And sorry if I’m not too clear in the text, me too tired but I really thought I should post this comment now lest I would forget about it.

Maybe these things can be thought of as meta data about the text? Just like you use the LANG attribute to describe the text’s language, you use the DIR attribute and BDO tag to describe its direction. (Okay, I do agree it’s silly to have an element just for this… They could’ve done something like dir=”rtl bdo” instead.)

And what about the DIR attribute? That is simply impossible to do with “direction characters” (at least in Windows XP), and DIR is extremely important (unlike BDO). So unfortunately, this whole direction business has to be done within HTML.

CSS has equivalent properties, but why should CSS-less users get strangely ordered text? Direction is a language thing, and thus it’s purely content, just like the LANG attribute.

Sorry if I’m being boring, the knowledge-sharing urge hit me again. Kudos for this wonderful site! =)

Also, note that BDO is not the same as the HTML “dir” attribute (or the parallel CSS “direction” property); the latter is absolutely necessary in Hebrew/Arabic documents, whereas BDO is quite an exotic thing.