David A. Wheeler scripsit:

> Unfortunately, <small> in HTML just makes the font smaller; it's by no
> means guaranteed that it's the right size for small capital letters.
> I worry that using <small> will make these REALLY important words hard
> to see, which is clearly not desired.  We *could* achieve that affect
> in CSS, but we're supposed to stick with HTML 3.2.  So I don't think
> <small> is a good idea here; we just don't have that fine a control
> over the typography.

While your concern is well-founded in theory, I don't think it's a big
problem in practice.  <small> may be a little too large, but the CSS
version is actually a little too small, at least on Chrome, Firefox, and
IE7.  Check out <http://ccil.org/~cowan/MicroXML-old.html> for an example
of the use of <small> in this context, and <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml>
for an example of the use of CSS.

It's possible that on *some* browsers <small> will look funny, but I
don't think it will be grossly too prominent or too vanishing.

> I think we'd be better off just making them bold, using <b>...</b>,
> and capitalizing them too.  Then it'd be rather hard to miss these
> key words.

Studies show that people's eyes jump immediately to bold text when first
looking at a page, so it makes sense to use it for headings, but almost
never is it useful at the level of a single word.  Unless you want the
text to be seen like this:  "... MUST ... MUST NOT ... SHOULD ... MAY ..."

Take a look at <http://www.atmark-techno.com/~yashi/libffi.html>,
where the return types of the functions being defined are in bold and
the function name and parameters are in italics.  At the beginning of
section 2.1, the definition of ffi_prep_cif looks at first glance like
a definition of ffi_status, but it's not.

--
John Cowan  xxxxxx@ccil.org  http://ccil.org/~cowan
And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should
be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population.
For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the
regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six
shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such
putrid black treason.  --Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee