In my experience my posts tend to end up here anyways, so I submit them myself so I can actually get notifications on people’s replies.
Indeed, I found this entire site through digging through post backlinks.
Additionally, since this site is my main source for tech news/blogposts, I don’t generally have anything new to contribute besides my own work.
I could just post my work elsewhere then wait for someone else to post it here, but then I would have no way to receive notifications about people’s comments on my work, and interacting with this community would become much more difficult.
also, the relevant line:
As a rule of thumb, self-promo should be less than a quarter of one’s stories and comments.
says stories and comments. I’m definitely making a lot more than 3 comments per self-submitted post, so i’m not even sure what rule i would be violating?
I don’t think anyone in this community would have seen this post and considered it worth submitting here. Treating this site as your personal comment section for all your content is just rude.
yeah, my reaction also was “that post seems odd” -> “oh, its a self-submission” -> “oh, of course its someone who just submits all their blogposts and nothing else :/”
If you submit a lot of your own posts, your standard for what to submit should be high. And few people actually write that many great posts.
You could use webmention on your blog. Lobsters support that, and it’s not hard to support. I do, with a CGI script that just makes a few sanity checks on the resulting POST request, then emails me the results.
Each blog post I make has <link rel="webmention" href="URL-of-CGI"> which points to the script. The resulting POST request has two parameters, source, which is the URL of the page linking to your page and target, which is the URL of the page being linked to.
Two issues: 1) it’s tied to my blogging engine, which is in C, and 2) the script itself is in C. If you still are interested, I can email you the source.
if an actual moderator wants to tell me that i’m misinterpreting the rules, and that interacting with almost every single comment on all my submitted stories isn’t enough, then i guess i’ll have to adjust my behavior, by all means, but until then..
It is fairly common here for the community to point out that we have a roughly 1/3 rule* regarding engagement between authored submissions and others. That is before pushcx starts banning your domain (Ctrl + F “self-promo” and “take a break”).
I have no horse in this race but 4 links to your own site in 14 days feels definitely like something others got banned for. And I feel like it would be unjust to accept it here just because others might submit your stories anyway. Because that is actually what is usually recommended: Let others submit your blog on their own, which makes sure it is not just blatant self promotion. Though we might have a conflict of interest here looking at the invite tree?
The part about notifications sounds like we might instead want an additional feature to subscribe to all comments on a submission - or simply all new entries for a specific domain.
Again - my gut feeling is simply that it would be unfair to allow it here but punish for this otherwise.
* It’s blurry because the exact moment people feel like you’re just engaging to self-promo / drive your agenda is blurry too.
The part about notifications sounds like we might instead want an additional feature to subscribe to all comments on a submission - or simply all new entries for a specific domain.
I would love this. I see a lot of submissions that are interesting, and I’m curious what people think about them, but they don’t have any comments yet. I tend to keep these stories open in a tab and refresh them periodically, but it would be great if there were a “watch” feature that would just notify me of any new comments on the submission.
Please clarify your rules. I cannot follow what I do not understand.
My interpretation was that as long as I was actually meaningful engaging with the community on self-submissions, it is fine. (specifically the phrasing of “write only” gave me that impression, if I’m reading everyone’s replies, how can I be treating it as “write only”?)
However, the interpretation I’ve seen in this thread is that replies on self promo stories are themselves self promotion. This would mean that engaging with people’s comments on my work would actually make things worse. This seems like a weird policy to have if you want to incentivize interaction, so therefore I would assume it is not correct.
One possible interpretation is that these replies are neutral, which would make more sense, however there is nothing in the wording to suggest that is the case.
I’ve made plenty of comments on other stories, perhaps even enough to satisfy the 2/3 rule under the most pessimistic interpretation.
or perhaps it’s not about the ratio, but just the raw frequency?
I could just stop submitting my own work, but that would make it very difficult to actually engage with the community w.r.t. my own work!
maybe this should just be implemented in code, anyways? I’d much rather I’d just gotten a “you are submitting too much of your own work as a new user, please slow down” pop-up instead of reading the same 3 sentences over and over trying to figure out what precisely they mean.
Yes, I would also expect to see less than a quarter of your comments on your own self-promo. Lots of people read /active and comments contribute to story score, so comments on one’s own stories are also seen as part of self-promo. The point of this one-quarter guideline is that it is very easy to reach if someone sees Lobsters as a forum they are part of rather than a traffic source with some occasional commenting chores.
The previous attempt at a simple code solution had a too-high false positive rate and I’m currently working on new features. So I appreciate your questions and I’m taking them into account as I continue this work. In ~45m I’ll be streaming office hours that’ll include that work, but to set expectations, it’ll be an overview, discussion with any chatters, and incremental progress rather than completely implementing a next approach in a couple hours.
So the current code feature I have to deal with topical, well-received self-promo from people who aren’t otherwise engaging with the community is to ban their domain for a year to give them a chance to acculturate and demonstrate that they’re here to join a community rather than harvest clicks. That feels like it would be too much for this situation.
EDIT: To be real explicit: you’ve submitted six links and 5 were to your own stuff. To get on the right side of the guideline, take a break from submitting your own work until you’ve submitted 19 more links. This isn’t a code limitation, it’s going to be the Lobsters community reading them and folding them into our discussions, so if you pull the first 19 links off r/programming’s newest page, we’re not going to see that as meaningful participation.
I do wish this conversation had happened less publicly, as while you have been very helpful, the sheer number of comments telling me slightly different things with varying levels of politeness has been frankly overwhelming.
There are a lot of posts, starting from a very simple nudge, because you have responded to every one with an excuse. That you have no other way to get notifications, that you’re ignoring the rules until a mod reiterates, that the rules are unclear and you have to engage, that an explanation again wasn’t specific enough, and now that there’s been an overwhelming number of public corrections. You’re getting many public responses because you’ve publicly tried to duck responsibility in so many different ways. The sum of your excuses is that you believe the rules don’t apply to you unless a mod explains to you in private and in detail but not too much length, to your preferred level of politeness, that rules do in fact apply to you because you are required to be here. And just typing that out… sure, you’ve convinced me to reach for code. I’m banning your blog until I think you aren’t here to exploit the community. If you try to find reasons to break the other guidelines, too, I’m going to ban you.
Listen to the feedback you’re getting. No-one likes a rules lawyer.
“This seems like a weird policy to have if you want to incentivize interaction” - this is a huge unfounded assumption on your part. This isn’t Reddit.
Let the community decide which content you make to submit to lobste.rs
Don’t worry about reading replies etc. immediately, stuff moves slower here than on bigger sites
Continue to engage in discussions on other submissions, or submit other interesting stuff
Work on your interpersonal communication. You come across as rude and abrasive. This is a small site, people will notice your behavior and not cut you as much slack going forward.
I’ll be honest, most of this just comes across as “stop being neurodivergent”.
I cannot simply flip a switch and suddenly understand subtle social cues. If something about my post was rude, you need to point out what exactly it is.
I’ll be honest, most of this just comes across as “stop being neurodivergent”.
I realize that being neurodivergent comes with its own unique challenges.
But I also think that there’s a higher proportion of neurodivergent individuals here than in the general population, and in the large we rub along quite well.
Saying “I’m neurodivergent” as an excuse to being abrasive or unkind is perilously close to using it as an excuse for trolling. Or rather, it’s a thing a troll would say.
I’ll disengage now, I realise there’s a been a lot dumped on you in the last few days. I hope you take the time to reflect, read other’s comments on this site, and figure out how it works here. If it helps, some people also wandered in here like a bull in a china shop but eventually settled down to be valued members of this community.
Oh, by the way “HTH, HAND” is a Usenet idiom. It stands for “Hope this helps. Have a nice day”.
However, the interpretation I’ve seen in this thread is that replies on self promo stories are themselves self promotion. This would mean that engaging with people’s comments on my work would actually make things worse.
Only if you interact very little outside your own self-submissions and are thus close to breaking the rule.
To keep this website alive, they have to enforce strong moderation rules and when you don’t have a lot of time and resources, it’s more efficient to ban in doubt to avoid letting things getting out of hand. Sure you’ll be getting a few false positives, but it sets the tone, and keep the front page clean.
That’s why lobster is not collapsing under its own weight despite a small team like many alternatives did and stays relevant.
I got banned for one year of posting things to my own site, and I’m generally a good web citizen who appreciates and understands moderation rules.
Don’t wait for pushcx to come in, it will likely be too late.
Relax my guy, it’s because of too much self-promo, lurk a bit and you’ll see this sort of thing actually happens a lot. You are far from the first person to self-promo too much, it’s actually something the community keeps a keen eye on.
The <small> element represents side comments such as small print.
None of my web projects use <big> or <small> so I’m not especially concerned about their fate. But if that is a valid semantic justification for <small>, I really can’t see why the opposite (“represents important ideas of the document”) wouldn’t be a valid justification for <big>.
While the spec says:
The <em> HTML element marks text that has stress emphasis.
The <strong> HTML element indicates that its contents have strong importance, seriousness, or urgency.
everyone tacitly understands that <em> is the “semantic <i>” and “<strong> is the semantic <b>”.
The situation with “retconned” elements is even weirder.
The <b> HTML element is used to draw the reader’s attention to the element’s contents, which are not otherwise granted special importance. This was formerly known as the Boldface element, and most browsers still draw the text in boldface. However, you should not use <b> for styling text or granting importance. If you wish to create boldface text, you should use the CSS font-weight property. If you wish to indicate an element is of special importance, you should use the <strong> element.
Use the for cases like keywords in a summary, product names in a review, or other spans of text whose typical presentation would be boldfaced (but not including any special importance).
So, product names and keywords aren’t of any special importance, except maybe when they are. But not when they aren’t.
And then there’s this:
The <i> HTML element represents a range of text that is set off from the normal text for some reason, such as idiomatic text, technical terms, taxonomical designations, among others.
Clearly written just to give the legacy <i> element some reason to exist, however strained it sounds.
The <i> and <em> distinction is an example of what I like to call “chickenshit semantics.” The spec really wants to imply that <em> is just a more principled way to italicize text. But I’d argue that using <em> for something like the title of a book is less semantic than just using <i>. Not all italics are used for emphasis!
I’d argue that a) any sort of marking that makes something stand out from the surrounding text is emphasis b) emphasis is not a useful semantic category.
But the main problem is the existence of browser defaults for <em> and <strong>. If they were more like HTML5 <footer>, <nav>, and the like (wouldn’t have any built-in presentation conventions apart from block vs inline), that would prevent their “misuse” for pure presentation purposes.
My usual reasoning about semantics is what a screen reader should do. In that book review example, I believe screen readers shouldn’t try to do anything special to book titles in <i> tags. In a non-visual medium, it would create more overhead for the listener than it’s worth. However, that <i> is still like “emphasis, in the sense that it’s marked as something else than a normal word, but not really the kind of emphasis that would be audible if the text was read out loud”.
I’m going to argue that for book titles, the most semantic approach is to use <span class="book-title"> and attach a style to it — in that case an automated tool can select book titles, and a web browser can display it as the author intended, while <i> is so vague that it works against semantics, not for it.
The spec really wants to imply that <em> is just a more principled way to italicize text. But I’d argue that using <em> for something like the title of a book is less semantic than just using <i>.
It sounds like you think the spec says to use <em> for book titles? It doesn’t; it says to use <cite> for that.
I don’t see how the spec disagrees with this (though the note under the definition of <em> really needs to be elaborated). <cite>, <dfn> and <var> exist too after all.
I guess my real beef is with Markdown, which emits <em> and <strong> when really all the information you’ve given it is “I want this to be italicized” and “I want this to be bold.” It’s almost a form of semantic hypercorrection.
I suspect this is a hangover from the Semantic Web discussions that were all the rage when Markdown was developed. Heck, I believe it even emitted compliant XHTML.
when really all the information you’ve given it is “I want this to be italicized” and “I want this to be bold.”
Is it really the information you’ve given though? It might be what you want the information you’ve given it to mean, but given that Markdown has never been defined in those terms it seems more like you’re upset that the tool has never worked the way that you’ve conceptualized it to work?
Depending on the specific text you’re composing there might be any number of valid ways of styling a <strong> element other than making it bold, for example using a highlighter pen effect, and the way Markdown has been defined since it was originally released in 2004 explicitly makes it possible to achieve this with semantically correct HTML.
In printed English, foreign words or phrases are italicized, like Et tu, Brute? (which is Latin). I used to use <span> with a class for this (with the lang attribute and the title attribute with the translation), but later learned I should instead just use <i>, which I started doing (keeping the lang and title attributes).
Wikipedia (through the MediaWiki software) mostly decided to keep outputting <big> for similar reasons (see e.g. this discussion). If browsers ever started seriously discussing dropping support, we’d just have our own extension to HTML; I drafted an example of what that might look like at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Legoktm/HTML%2BMediaWiki. I don’t expect this to ever be a practical problem though.
If you want the convenience of a tag that is simply labeled big, you should probably just look into the myriad markdown embedders. HTML as a human language is almost in itself obsolete, it’s just more ductwork for higher-level concepts like JS frameworks and markdown formatting.
Right. A lot of programmers like to look at the exact machine instructions that their programs compile down to, even if they wrote the program in something higher-level than assembly. (And while they’re usually doing this in the name of auditing performance or verifying their compiler’s correctness, sometimes they’re doing it on purely aesthetic grounds!) Caring about my exact HTML, even though I’m writing in Markdown, is the document-on-the-web equivalent of that.
@binarycat, please observe the guidelines on self-promotion.
In my experience my posts tend to end up here anyways, so I submit them myself so I can actually get notifications on people’s replies.
Indeed, I found this entire site through digging through post backlinks.
Additionally, since this site is my main source for tech news/blogposts, I don’t generally have anything new to contribute besides my own work.
I could just post my work elsewhere then wait for someone else to post it here, but then I would have no way to receive notifications about people’s comments on my work, and interacting with this community would become much more difficult.
also, the relevant line:
says stories and comments. I’m definitely making a lot more than 3 comments per self-submitted post, so i’m not even sure what rule i would be violating?
I don’t think anyone in this community would have seen this post and considered it worth submitting here. Treating this site as your personal comment section for all your content is just rude.
yeah, my reaction also was “that post seems odd” -> “oh, its a self-submission” -> “oh, of course its someone who just submits all their blogposts and nothing else :/”
If you submit a lot of your own posts, your standard for what to submit should be high. And few people actually write that many great posts.
That’s my secret: I don’t finish blog posts (and when I do they aren’t good).
I seem to have submitted one of my own every 3 years, you should try it, some good comments sometimes ;)
You could use webmention on your blog. Lobsters support that, and it’s not hard to support. I do, with a CGI script that just makes a few sanity checks on the resulting POST request, then emails me the results.
Each blog post I make has
<link rel="webmention" href="URL-of-CGI">which points to the script. The resulting POST request has two parameters,source, which is the URL of the page linking to your page andtarget, which is the URL of the page being linked to.oh could I have that script? I’ve been interested in implementing webmentions for a while but never got around to it.
Two issues: 1) it’s tied to my blogging engine, which is in C, and 2) the script itself is in C. If you still are interested, I can email you the source.
This usually also means “comments that are on your own authored submission count to the self-submitted part”.
hold on, you’re not even a moderator?
if an actual moderator wants to tell me that i’m misinterpreting the rules, and that interacting with almost every single comment on all my submitted stories isn’t enough, then i guess i’ll have to adjust my behavior, by all means, but until then..
It is fairly common here for the community to point out that we have a roughly 1/3 rule* regarding engagement between authored submissions and others. That is before pushcx starts banning your domain (Ctrl + F “self-promo” and “take a break”).
I have no horse in this race but 4 links to your own site in 14 days feels definitely like something others got banned for. And I feel like it would be unjust to accept it here just because others might submit your stories anyway. Because that is actually what is usually recommended: Let others submit your blog on their own, which makes sure it is not just blatant self promotion. Though we might have a conflict of interest here looking at the invite tree?
The part about notifications sounds like we might instead want an additional feature to subscribe to all comments on a submission - or simply all new entries for a specific domain.
Again - my gut feeling is simply that it would be unfair to allow it here but punish for this otherwise.
* It’s blurry because the exact moment people feel like you’re just engaging to self-promo / drive your agenda is blurry too.
I would love this. I see a lot of submissions that are interesting, and I’m curious what people think about them, but they don’t have any comments yet. I tend to keep these stories open in a tab and refresh them periodically, but it would be great if there were a “watch” feature that would just notify me of any new comments on the submission.
Same here!
@adamshaylor is correct, and so is @proctrap in their reply to this comment.
If the only thing you’re doing on the site is promoting your work, it’s not OK. Lobsters is a community, not your marketing channel.
Please clarify your rules. I cannot follow what I do not understand.
My interpretation was that as long as I was actually meaningful engaging with the community on self-submissions, it is fine. (specifically the phrasing of “write only” gave me that impression, if I’m reading everyone’s replies, how can I be treating it as “write only”?)
However, the interpretation I’ve seen in this thread is that replies on self promo stories are themselves self promotion. This would mean that engaging with people’s comments on my work would actually make things worse. This seems like a weird policy to have if you want to incentivize interaction, so therefore I would assume it is not correct.
One possible interpretation is that these replies are neutral, which would make more sense, however there is nothing in the wording to suggest that is the case.
I’ve made plenty of comments on other stories, perhaps even enough to satisfy the 2/3 rule under the most pessimistic interpretation.
or perhaps it’s not about the ratio, but just the raw frequency?
I could just stop submitting my own work, but that would make it very difficult to actually engage with the community w.r.t. my own work!
maybe this should just be implemented in code, anyways? I’d much rather I’d just gotten a “you are submitting too much of your own work as a new user, please slow down” pop-up instead of reading the same 3 sentences over and over trying to figure out what precisely they mean.
Yes, I would also expect to see less than a quarter of your comments on your own self-promo. Lots of people read /active and comments contribute to story score, so comments on one’s own stories are also seen as part of self-promo. The point of this one-quarter guideline is that it is very easy to reach if someone sees Lobsters as a forum they are part of rather than a traffic source with some occasional commenting chores.
The previous attempt at a simple code solution had a too-high false positive rate and I’m currently working on new features. So I appreciate your questions and I’m taking them into account as I continue this work. In ~45m I’ll be streaming office hours that’ll include that work, but to set expectations, it’ll be an overview, discussion with any chatters, and incremental progress rather than completely implementing a next approach in a couple hours.
So the current code feature I have to deal with topical, well-received self-promo from people who aren’t otherwise engaging with the community is to ban their domain for a year to give them a chance to acculturate and demonstrate that they’re here to join a community rather than harvest clicks. That feels like it would be too much for this situation.
EDIT: To be real explicit: you’ve submitted six links and 5 were to your own stuff. To get on the right side of the guideline, take a break from submitting your own work until you’ve submitted 19 more links. This isn’t a code limitation, it’s going to be the Lobsters community reading them and folding them into our discussions, so if you pull the first 19 links off r/programming’s newest page, we’re not going to see that as meaningful participation.
Thank you for clarifying this.
I do wish this conversation had happened less publicly, as while you have been very helpful, the sheer number of comments telling me slightly different things with varying levels of politeness has been frankly overwhelming.
There are a lot of posts, starting from a very simple nudge, because you have responded to every one with an excuse. That you have no other way to get notifications, that you’re ignoring the rules until a mod reiterates, that the rules are unclear and you have to engage, that an explanation again wasn’t specific enough, and now that there’s been an overwhelming number of public corrections. You’re getting many public responses because you’ve publicly tried to duck responsibility in so many different ways. The sum of your excuses is that you believe the rules don’t apply to you unless a mod explains to you in private and in detail but not too much length, to your preferred level of politeness, that rules do in fact apply to you because you are required to be here. And just typing that out… sure, you’ve convinced me to reach for code. I’m banning your blog until I think you aren’t here to exploit the community. If you try to find reasons to break the other guidelines, too, I’m going to ban you.
HTH. HAND.
I’ll be honest, most of this just comes across as “stop being neurodivergent”.
I cannot simply flip a switch and suddenly understand subtle social cues. If something about my post was rude, you need to point out what exactly it is.
This is not helping my confusion.
I realize that being neurodivergent comes with its own unique challenges.
But I also think that there’s a higher proportion of neurodivergent individuals here than in the general population, and in the large we rub along quite well.
Saying “I’m neurodivergent” as an excuse to being abrasive or unkind is perilously close to using it as an excuse for trolling. Or rather, it’s a thing a troll would say.
I’ll disengage now, I realise there’s a been a lot dumped on you in the last few days. I hope you take the time to reflect, read other’s comments on this site, and figure out how it works here. If it helps, some people also wandered in here like a bull in a china shop but eventually settled down to be valued members of this community.
Oh, by the way “HTH, HAND” is a Usenet idiom. It stands for “Hope this helps. Have a nice day”.
Only if you interact very little outside your own self-submissions and are thus close to breaking the rule.
OP is doing you a favor by telling you this.
To keep this website alive, they have to enforce strong moderation rules and when you don’t have a lot of time and resources, it’s more efficient to ban in doubt to avoid letting things getting out of hand. Sure you’ll be getting a few false positives, but it sets the tone, and keep the front page clean.
That’s why lobster is not collapsing under its own weight despite a small team like many alternatives did and stays relevant.
I got banned for one year of posting things to my own site, and I’m generally a good web citizen who appreciates and understands moderation rules.
Don’t wait for pushcx to come in, it will likely be too late.
I can’t help but wonder if people are calling this spam because of the way I phrased the title…
I said “plea” because it rhymes…
after all, noone had an issue with any of my other “self promotion” posts…
Relax my guy, it’s because of too much self-promo, lurk a bit and you’ll see this sort of thing actually happens a lot. You are far from the first person to self-promo too much, it’s actually something the community keeps a keen eye on.
None of my web projects use
<big>or<small>so I’m not especially concerned about their fate. But if that is a valid semantic justification for<small>, I really can’t see why the opposite (“represents important ideas of the document”) wouldn’t be a valid justification for<big>.While the spec says:
everyone tacitly understands that
<em>is the “semantic<i>” and “<strong>is the semantic<b>”.The situation with “retconned” elements is even weirder.
So, product names and keywords aren’t of any special importance, except maybe when they are. But not when they aren’t.
And then there’s this:
Clearly written just to give the legacy
<i>element some reason to exist, however strained it sounds.The
<i>and<em>distinction is an example of what I like to call “chickenshit semantics.” The spec really wants to imply that<em>is just a more principled way to italicize text. But I’d argue that using<em>for something like the title of a book is less semantic than just using<i>. Not all italics are used for emphasis!I’d argue that a) any sort of marking that makes something stand out from the surrounding text is emphasis b) emphasis is not a useful semantic category.
But the main problem is the existence of browser defaults for
<em>and<strong>. If they were more like HTML5<footer>,<nav>, and the like (wouldn’t have any built-in presentation conventions apart from block vs inline), that would prevent their “misuse” for pure presentation purposes.My usual reasoning about semantics is what a screen reader should do. In that book review example, I believe screen readers shouldn’t try to do anything special to book titles in
<i>tags. In a non-visual medium, it would create more overhead for the listener than it’s worth. However, that<i>is still like “emphasis, in the sense that it’s marked as something else than a normal word, but not really the kind of emphasis that would be audible if the text was read out loud”.I’m going to argue that for book titles, the most semantic approach is to use
<span class="book-title">and attach a style to it — in that case an automated tool can select book titles, and a web browser can display it as the author intended, while<i>is so vague that it works against semantics, not for it.It sounds like you think the spec says to use
<em>for book titles? It doesn’t; it says to use<cite>for that.I don’t see how the spec disagrees with this (though the note under the definition of
<em>really needs to be elaborated).<cite>,<dfn>and<var>exist too after all.I guess my real beef is with Markdown, which emits
<em>and<strong>when really all the information you’ve given it is “I want this to be italicized” and “I want this to be bold.” It’s almost a form of semantic hypercorrection.I suspect this is a hangover from the Semantic Web discussions that were all the rage when Markdown was developed. Heck, I believe it even emitted compliant XHTML.
Is it really the information you’ve given though? It might be what you want the information you’ve given it to mean, but given that Markdown has never been defined in those terms it seems more like you’re upset that the tool has never worked the way that you’ve conceptualized it to work?
Depending on the specific text you’re composing there might be any number of valid ways of styling a
<strong>element other than making it bold, for example using a highlighter pen effect, and the way Markdown has been defined since it was originally released in 2004 explicitly makes it possible to achieve this with semantically correct HTML.In printed English, foreign words or phrases are italicized, like Et tu, Brute? (which is Latin). I used to use
<span>with a class for this (with the lang attribute and the title attribute with the translation), but later learned I should instead just use<i>, which I started doing (keeping the lang and title attributes).CommonMark calls them emphasis and strong emphasis — style them how you like.
Wikipedia (through the MediaWiki software) mostly decided to keep outputting
<big>for similar reasons (see e.g. this discussion). If browsers ever started seriously discussing dropping support, we’d just have our own extension to HTML; I drafted an example of what that might look like at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Legoktm/HTML%2BMediaWiki. I don’t expect this to ever be a practical problem though.If you want the convenience of a tag that is simply labeled
big, you should probably just look into the myriad markdown embedders. HTML as a human language is almost in itself obsolete, it’s just more ductwork for higher-level concepts like JS frameworks and markdown formatting.The Markdown still has to compile to something, and
<big>would be better than<span class="big">for tools like screen readers.Right. A lot of programmers like to look at the exact machine instructions that their programs compile down to, even if they wrote the program in something higher-level than assembly. (And while they’re usually doing this in the name of auditing performance or verifying their compiler’s correctness, sometimes they’re doing it on purely aesthetic grounds!) Caring about my exact HTML, even though I’m writing in Markdown, is the document-on-the-web equivalent of that.