[BUG] HTMLText <H5> incorrectly converted

[Mark Waddingham]

> I doesn't go back to HyperCard, since HC had no native html
> capabilities. It does go back to MetaCard, and I vaguely recall some
> of the header level tags being italic back then. I suspect this was
> modelled on the most common browser interpretations at the time, which
> has changed quite a bit since then. It's been, what, 20 years?

Indeed - I think this is perhaps the most likely explanation.

As it turns out a very similar issue was reported recently with regard 
use of named colors and their RGB mappings (Bug 15621). The mapping the 
engine uses for those seems to have been defined relative to a specific 
UNIX terminal / display / X11 implementation which is not quite the same 
as what has become the 'defacto' X11 standard mappings (the X11 standard 
only ever gave informative values for them, rather than normative ones).

The solution in both cases is not to change the current mappings, but 
instead to (at some point) make the mappings configurable at runtime. Of 
course, the rub here is that this causes a global interoperability 
problem which is not (at this time) clear how to resolve. i.e. In the 
IDE you could be editing two 'applications' at once both of which want 
different settings. (Note that keying this at the stack level isn't 
necessarily correct as stacks can be used as libraries in different 
contexts - there needs to be some notion of 'project scope' which would 
arbitrate what mappings were used when).

In any case, I've updated both bug reports to reflect this - i.e. as an 
enhancement to allow these things to be configurable at runtime.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps