[wp-hackers] Re: [wp-svn] [2476] trunk/wp-admin/quicktags.js: Quicktag enhancements

[David House]

Getting back to the issue of whether or not to use strong or em on the
quicktags...

My thoughts are that WordPress' mission statement claimed that it was
a 'semantic' platform and that this is thus an extremely important
debate. There seems to be no ideal solution: most users will be used
to working in the presentational mindset, meaning that they think in
terms of making things bold and italic rather than making things
emphasised or marking up a citation, etc.

But surely that hanging our heads in resignation and going with
presentational markup that won't do any good for the semantic web at
large, why not try and educate new WordPress users in how the web is
different? It doesn't need to be an involved discussion at all, just
mention something like 'To emphasise your words, use the "em"
quicktag. To use a citation, use the "cite" quicktags around the
address of your citation. These may be presented the same but it's
still important to make the distinction' Of course, links could be
provided to more in-depth discussion if required.

Display a couple of paragraphs to that effect on the Successful
Installation screen, then I think these sorts of issues will start to
disappear.

And for the record, I don't think that any rich-text editor that tries
to ape a word processor will ever work in conjunction with the
semantic web.

Food for thought, anyway.

-Dave