2013/11/30 Max Köhler <max@koehler-kn.de>
>
> uppercase and small caps: this may be useful and nice for Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Armenian, but other  writing systems don't have it. Depending on it for adding elegance or for emphasis is not a good idea.
>
> That's a very interesting problem you bring up.. As far as I can see, we need inline styling for two different cases:
>
> - To add emphasis. In my opinion, italics would be the best option here. They don't interrupt the reading experience as bold set words do.

Italics are, actually, a yet another example of a Western-centric typography thinking. They are so commonly used in Latin and Cyrillic that most markup languages and word processors provide very accessible support for them, but they aren't so natural in many other scripts. In the typography of Hebrew, which I speak, using italics is considered bad taste by many, and using bold weight or a different typeface is preferred.

That is, more or less, the reason why W3C recommends using <em> rather than <i>. Ideally the ''double apostrophe'' in wiki-syntax will insert <em> (now it inserts <i>), and we'll have styling somewhere along these lines:

.script-latn em {

    font-style: italic;

}

.script-hebr em {
}

(Of course, this is just a simplistic suggestion and the actual styling may be different.)

> ps: hi. I'm the new kid on the block.

Welcome :)

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬