Comments on: Presentational HTML – Semantically Useful or Wastefully Deprecated?

By: Marcin

Marcin — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:08:19 +0000

nice portfolio – many good looking webs.. gratulations

By: Travis Turner

Travis Turner — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:50:08 +0000

I have to admit, I’ve almost completely abandoned inline styles except when quickly mashing something together, or for initial look and feel before I go back and move everything into a stylesheet.

I suppose, from an accessibility standpoint, this is probably frowned upon because it hinders a screen-reader’s ability to place emphasis on certain parts of the text or what have you. But to be completely honest, most of my styling seems to be for the presentation layer and NOT for semantics.

By: Chris Coyier

Chris Coyier — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:08:32 +0000

The reasoning behind replacing is semantics. It’s better to tags that generically describe the intent of the enclosed content than what it should look like. Emphasis might look like italic on one site, where on another it could mean 120% font size and bright red. If it’s the latter, the tag no longer makes sense… It’s kind of like how class names like “BigLeft” are bad, since later that same class could be needed to apply a small and right formatting.

That being said… I still find myself using the small tag fairly often. Mostly because it’s another INLINE element that does what it says on the box. Sometimes you need an extra hook within a p tag, and don’t want to use strong or em, and small fits the bill nicely.