I’ve seen this quite often, where a correction is made in an article, and the wrong information has a line through it like in a handwritten note, and the the correct information is right after it. Why not just delete the wrong information and insert the correction?
[ul]
[li]Journalistic integrity: if you really did say something and edit it later, you should be open about it[/li][li]Basic understanding: comments may have been made before the edit that won’t make sense after[/li][li]Humor: used even if the post wasn’t edited after the fact. A modern version of the old ^H joke (one of my favorites).[/li][/ul]
Some sites, like Slate, do insert the corrected information, with an asterisk leading to a footnote about the original.
The web is all about cpying and pasting information. Without some signal that a correction has been made, you’d have two separate versions floating around, both purporting to be the original taken directly off the site. The web is not the same as print media.
J Cubed also has several important reasons. There are many good reasons to do it, and none whatsoever not to do it.
Frequently, it’s a device the writer uses to tell you that
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his first impulse was to characterise whatever he is referring to this way; but
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he thought better of it and characterised it that way.
Frequently, the first categorisation is critical, or pejorative, or offensive, and the second more dispassionate. The writer is acknowledging tghat he cannot, if pressed, sustain or justify the pejorative categorisation, so he is withdrawing it and replacing it with a more neutral one. This enables him to tell you his pejorative thoughts, while disarming critics who might object that his pejorative thoughts are unwarranted.
Sometimes, it’s because the correction will have been prompted by a comment posted at the bottom of the page. If you just apply the edit, you make the commentor look like a dumbass to anyone arriving at the page later.
I can give you one. Lined through text reads like normal text when I use my text to speech engine, which I do all the time for text.
Does your screen reader do that, even if it’s done with “del” and “ins”, rather than “strike” or “linethrough”?
Like, W3Schools Tryit Editor
It read the whole thing.
My apologies. I would have thought that text-to-speech readers would recognize such a common tag.
That’s just [del]nuts[/del] brilliant!