[dokuwiki] Re: presentation vs semantics (was Selecting a Wiki engine...)

Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
At 13:21 +0200 UTC, on 2006-10-05, Oliver Betz wrote: 

''Emphasize'' and '''strongly''' is not that intuitive as **bold**
and //italic//, but bold/italic isn't the right wording, anyway, is
it?



Ah! I hadn't noticed yet that Dokuwiki translates bold to <strong> and italic
and underline to <em>. But what's the rationale behind calling this bold,
italic and underline in the UI, even in the documentation?

Most browsers render <strong> visually as bold and <em> as italic.
Bold and italic do not mean anything semantically, but users often *mean* "strong" or "emphasize" with using them.


FWIW, I think a nicer approach would be to name it for what it is: "emphasis"
(or "emphasize"). An appropriate icon for the toolbar might be that of an
exclamation mark. (And IMO you only need to provide 1 single emphasis
function, because <strong> isn't that useful anyway. When it's really needed,
you can nest <em>.)

Most users (unfortunately) think visually and not semantically, because they are used to it by other applications. Hence, they would not understand "strong" and "emphasized".
One single emphasis function wouldn't suffice, because people would revolte against not having the most common formatting (bold, italic, underline). And people often use italics not in order to say "more emphasized", but "less emphasized" ...


After all, it's the CSS that decides on the presentation. Users get confused
if using the italics buton results in text being presented bold and red.

Yes, the CSS decides on the presentation, but also the default browser styles decide on it (if not overwritten). And the reason for a "text being presented bold and red" if the italics button is used, could also be if it produced an <i> tag and no <em>, because someone could have overwritten that as well.

Also, my Dokuwiki users tend to abuse bold and italic for things that really
are headings. I strongly suspect that wouldn't happen if the UI would be more
true about what this really is about: emphasis.

I don't think changing the UI would help. Believe me: Users will abuse *everything*! Most of them are only interested in how it looks like and not what it means. :-(


Anika

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