Posted by Stan McCann on 02/02/06 16:24

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote in
news:Xns975E4F1C9CD18jkorpelacstutfi@193.229.4.246:

> Stan McCann <me@stanmccann.us> wrote:
>
>> I guess I had never really read the docs on address;
>> you are also slightly off on the definition. It doesn't have to be
>> the address of the author, but contact information for the
>> document, which is not always the same.
>
> To stay on the safe side, we should expect them to be the same,
> since the summary at
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/index/elements.html says that
> <address> is "information on author", and the DTD comment says the
> same.

I do not see "information on author" anywhere in that specification.
What it says is "may be used by authors to supply contact information
for a document or a major part of a document." Not the same at all. I
am the author of a number of pages that I am not the correct contact
person for. As I said, author and contact are not always the same.

>> As for the
>> default display to be italics. Irrelevant. I can style it any way
>> I want.
>
> With the usual CSS caveats. Did you forget them? My point is that by
> using <address> you take the unnecessary risk of having the content
> displayed in italics in some browsing situations. When you would use

No, I didn't forget about not having control at the viewer's end, I
said it was irrelevant to consider the default display. You addressed
this in another post and to a point, I must agree.

> With a list (<ul> or <ol>), you would have the problem of _default_
> rendering, with bullets or numbers. An attempt to remove the bullets
> or numbers with CSS might or might not be successful.
>

How does an audio reader render lists? Does it say "bullett" for each
list item? Most modern browsers will display CSS mostly correct. So,
if a ul is semantically correct, the fact that bulletts are the default
display is irrelavent, a very very small number of people might see the
address list presented with bulletts. I'll have to ask someone about
the presentation of it in audio as that would be a concern.

Hey, I teach this stuff too, so I want to *know* before I go telling my
classes one way or another.

--
Stan McCann, "Uncle Pirate" http://stanmccann.us/
Webmaster, NMSU at Alamogordo http://alamo.nmsu.edu/
Now blocking Google Grouper posts and replies.
http://blinkynet.net/comp/uip5.html

[Back to original message]