Re: whither <u>...</u>?

"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 94 15:19:33 EDT
Message-id: <9406151919.AA00859@ulua.hal.com>
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From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-ig@oclc.org>
Subject: Re: whither <u>...</u>? 
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In message <CMM.0.90.4.771706472.reed@hades.cshl.org>, Corprew Reed writes:
>
>Topic: Level 1 Features
>Proposal: Consistency for <u> tag

[By the way... you're supposed to choose a side when you make a
proposal.  So the proposal should be "Take U tag out of
Highlighting.html" or "Fix DTD w.r.t. U tag". I'm guilty of this
fence-sitting myself, but let's try to avoid it in the future...]

>Hi.  I was wondering whether there was some previously reached decision about
>dropping <u> from the document id'd as:
>
> $Id: html-1.dtd,v 1.1 1994/06/13 20:55:46 connolly Exp $
>(a.k.a.  The HTML Level 1 DTD, a.k.a
>http://www.hal.com/%7Econnolly/html-spec/html-1.dtd) 
>
>or if it has just dropped out in the works.
>
>The lines in the DTD to which I refer are:
>
><!ENTITY % font " TT | B | I "
>        -- @# U underline? S strike? -->

Good catch.

By the way, perhaps everybody should know: "@#" is a magic cookie I
use to mean "need to look at this again sometime, but it'll do for
now" and "@@" means: "ACK! BROKEN! FIX IT BEFORE ANYBODY ELSE SEES
IT!" Before any significant release, I usually do:

	grep @# *.[ch] (or in this case, *.html)

	grep @@ *.[ch]

and look over the results.


Anyway, one day I found out that mosaic doesn't support the KEY
element, so I went hunting through the code to find out just what it
does support.

I found out it supports strikethrough, and uses the name S.

I found out it _doesn't_ support the U element.

>I checked four browsers (Lynx 2.x, XMosaic 2.x, MacMosaic 2.0A, and MacWeb
>0.98A) and it was only implemented in the Mac browsers.
>
>I don't particularly care for <u>, but it has shown up in output from
>some converters and on some pages.  Should it be put in the DTD under
>the flag of current practice?


My vote: put it in for use in RTF, rainbow, etc. converters, but
don't requre that it be rendered differently from B and I.

So a level 1 implementation has to support at least three styles:

	plain, EM, and STRONG must be distinct;
	plain, B, and I must be distinct;
	each of CITE, DFN, VAR, KBD... must be distinct from plain

but other than that, anything is fair game. A browser might, for example
render:

	plain as plain
	EM, I, U, CITE with underlining
	BOLD, STRONG, KBD with overstrike

Hmmm... what about STRIKE? It's hardly worth putting it in there
if we don't require that it be a separate style.

>If it is being dropped, I'll provide diffs for
>http://www.hal.com/~connolly/html-spec/Highlighting.html, which currently
>lists it as one of the Physical markups.

Great! I'll hold you to that, you know...

Dan