piling new semantics on old

Once upon a time we used b for bold and i for italic.  Now, well, I 
don't think anyone's sure any more.

http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-b-and-i-tags

We talk a lot here about the difficulties of versioning and the 
challenges that creates for interpreting documents.  I think this may be 
an excellent case of just how strange simple things can become after that.

There is, of course, the class attribute to help, but after hearing 
various claims about how semantics should really be carried by elements 
in HTML5, it seems inconsistent somehow.

Oh well - hopefully this will enrich some XML vocabulary-building tutorials.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/