, , N-G-O!

Mind your <b>‘s and <i>‘s. In a “semantic” frenzy, I once made the mistake of converting all my b and i tags to strong and em, even for non-emphasized words which should rather have been enclosed in dfn, cite, address, var, code, samp, kbd, or blockquote. That’s what the “semantic” is all about. Sure, it’s a few more tags to keep track of, but they’ll be directly related to the meaning of the tagged text, and can be styled accordingly.

blockquote is a bit confusing about that, as Andrei Herasimchuk rants. The blockquote tag is not a true block-level element on its own, but a container tag into which elements such as paragraphs (enclosed in p tags) should be inserted. MovableType (at least, the version that I’m using at this writing) is annoyingly quirky over that when in “Convert Line Breaks” mode, putting p tags around single-line blockquote tags. When incorporating blockquote into an entry, I need to turn off Text Formatting and do my paragraphs manually. I’m hoping the MT team can fix that in the upcoming 3.x version. (No, I’d rather not use a plugin.)

Comments

  1. Sparticus says:

    I know what you mean, the times I’ve spend trying to get headers and lists to work inside movabletype and then giving up and turning off conver-line breaks and inserting every p and br / by hand. Bring on MT 3.0!

  2. filmgoerjuan says:

    I gave up early on and have done all my text formatting by hand in MT. I also reworked the template code to be XHTML 1.1 valid, so I tend to be rather fussy about these things (it probably comes from having to code nested tables and serving up NN4.x hacks all day)

  3. AnP says:

    I know exactly what you mean!