[uf-discuss] a very early draft proposal hTagcloud

[John Allsopp]

Ben,

> On 20 Sep 2006, at 10:45, Matthew Levine wrote:
>> However, I'm not whether I like exploiting nesting order. It feels  
>> a bit hackish, and isn't as semantically unambiguous as Ben's  
>> initial example.
>
> Yeah, I considered EM > STRONG and STRONG > EM as well but as you  
> say, it's very hackish and in my interpretation of the semantics I  
> come to one of two conclusions:
>
> * Either EM > STRONG and STRONG > EM are equal, so couldn't  
> represent different levels
> or
> * EM > STRONG is semantically invalid as ‘Strong emphasis’ is  
> greater than ‘Emphasis’. It seems very wrong that EM can be the  
> parent of another element which describes a larger, bigger  
> application of the same semantic… unless we were to make EM inherit  
> semantics from the little known TARDIS element.

That's how I tend to feel about the use of nested ems, strong + em  
and so on.

It's very clever, without any doubt. It is however very divergent  
from almost all current developer practice (which of course does not  
remotely make it incorrect, but possibly harder to get adoption), and  
in the case of deeply nested ems (even if we weights to 5 levels we  
get thigns like this <em><em><em><em><em><a href="...">tag</em></em></ 
em></em></em>) perhaps even more so. I also consider this in more  
detail in the article so won't.
On the other hand, as tagclouds are most likely to software  
generated, this really might not be such an issue.

thanks, I am glad that the article has prompted such interesting  
discussion

j
John Allsopp

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