[wp-hackers] Post style buttons

[Dougal Campbell]

Elliotte Harold wrote:
> Andy Skelton wrote:
>> I'm going to try and prevent another presentation-versus-semantics
>> debate. There is no point in going there. Each is important to
>> different people at different times. However, we are all concerned
>> with presentation at one time or another. The point of the rich editor
>> is to let people control presentation (not semantics!) in a way that
>> they have probably already learned. The B and I buttons are going to
>> be around for a while yet.
>
> I'm not using the rich editor. I use the plain text editor, and it
> doesn't make text bold when I press the b button. It inserts a strong
> element. The label should match the behavior.
>

I could be remembering incorrectly, but I think that a long time ago, in
a galaxy far away, those quicktag buttons used to actually generate <b>
and <i> tags. Then we switched them to <strong> and <em>, and labeled
the buttons to match. But lots of users complained that they didn't
understand what 'strong' and 'em' meant, and our arguments about
semantics didn't mean much to the average user, and besides that, the
new button labels took up more space in the toolbar so could we please
change them back?

So we compromised by using the semantics that are correct 99% of the
time but with the labels that 99% of users are comfortable with.  It
might be an ugly compromise, but it works for most cases.

At least, that's how I remember it.

Personally, I live in the code editor. I turn off wpautop and
wptexturize via a plugin, and write almost all of the html in my posts
by hand. About the only quicktags buttons I ever use are for links, and
occassionally for [un]ordered lists.

-- 
Dougal Campbell <dougal at gunters.org>
http://dougal.gunters.org/