Here’s a trivial little piece of inline tagging that is nagging me:

It’s a classic chicken-or-egg problem, really. The tagging is commonplace enough; it’s trivial, crude, even, and represents an emphasised and superscripted number, but should the number be emphasised first and then superscripted, or should it be the other way around, like this:

I know, I really shouldn’t bother, but it is precisely this kind of nested inline tagging that can completely stop me in my tracks. In a wider context, the question is: is the order of nesting important? That is, semantically speaking, is there a difference? Am I saying that an emphasised (in other words, important) number happens to be superscripted, or that a superscripted number happens to be emphasised (important)?

More often than not, this type of inline tagging is about formatting, not semantics, so it probably doesn’t matter. Also, emphasis as an inline tag is dodgy at best because while it says that the highlighted text is important but fails to mention why, and the “why” is what is important if we want semantics, if we need intelligence. It’s the same with superscript and subscript elements, and quite a few other common inline elements that are about how things should be presented rather than structured.

But then, of course, formatting is useful, too, because it can visualise abstract concepts.

Chicken or egg, folks? Me, I don’t know. I only wrote this because I needed a break form designing an export format from a product database, a format where I need to visualise data.