Presentational and semantic hooha
Thursday, May 06, 2004
Matthew Thomas has an interesting article (When semantic markup goes bad) about people (and tools) who just blindy replace all instances of <b> with <strong> without actually thinking about whether it makes sense to do so.
Of course, not thinking about it probably means most of your markup isn’t actually semantic anyway, because it requires a degree of thought to get right.
On a related note, although the original Textile doesn’t let you insert <b> tags, JTextile does via **double asterices**.
JTextile is based on a mix of the original Textile and Mark Pilgrim’s original PyTextile which it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at; doing so now, it’s been rewritten to follow the new and overblown Textile 2 syntax. A couple of the nicer features (such as easy links to Google, IMDB, Amazon) might make it to JTextile, but as for the rest – you really may just as well use HTML.