Good day everyone 
In the lesson “What Are the U, S, and Ruby Elements Used For, and How Do They Work?” in the new fullstack curriculum, the u element in HTML is described as the “unarticulated annotation” element, which “is used to represent inline text that has non-textual annotation applied”. Could someone please clarify what this means?
Thank you!
The default behaviour of this element is underlining the text within it. The underline is the annotation applied, but you could change it to something else like a wavy underline. It is used to indicate spelling errors and such like. It shouldn’t be used presentationally for underlining, where you should use CSS.
I understood the common use cases and the fact that you should use CSS if you just want to underline, but I’m not clear on the terms being used.
The underline is the annotation applied
Are you saying that the terms “non-textual annotation” and “unarticulated annotation” refer to the underlining (or whatever other styling is applied to the u element)?
That would make sense, though I wouldn’t have thought of it as such. I always thought the word annotation implied the presence of a comment or explanantion of some sort.
“non-textual” is more easily understood as “non-text”. A mark up by underlining is a non-textual annotation. Annotation does mean the application of a mark up of some sort to some text, such as crossing it out.
That makes sense. Thanks a lot!