On 4/24/05, John Blumel <johnblumel(a)earthlink.net> wrote:
I mean, what's the
actual difference, other than that they are different words, between
"emphasis" and "distinction" in this context
A word that is emphasised is intended to draw your attention to that
word more than other words on the page. The distinction being made
here, however, is simply "this is not the word 'defiant', it is the
name 'Defiant'" - you are not intended to take *more notice* of the
word than other words in the sentence, just interpret it differently
from the same word in other sentences.
"The <i>Defiant</i> is defiant"
As it happens, English also uses initial capitals to make a similar
distinction, so it is *almost* redundant anyway; but for one thing,
other languages don't (German puts a Capital on all Nouns, for
Instance), and for another, it is sometimes regarded as trendy to play
with capitalisation (e.g. with technology-related trademarks), so that
"proper nouns" end up with a lower-case initial. If you need to
distinguish these, you might therefore use <i>italics</i> to show you
aren't just using a generic noun (you might not, of course, but if you
did, it would not be for <em>emphasis</em>).
"The <i>smart</i> looks smart" [as in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_%28automobile%29]
[...] degrees of distinction that the HTML spec
doesn't support
because it "claims" there is no meaning attached to i or b. One could
argue that i and b should never be used because they lack official
meaning. But again this is an artificial distinction that ignores why
italic and bold text were created in the first place.
I think possibly you're misunderstanding here; the HTML spec defines
<i> as being italics, of all sorts; however, it also defines tags
which are *more specific than that*. At the very least, you could
define <em> by exclusion - list out rules like: "if it's a citation,
you should be using <cite>", and given a tag for every such specific
use of italics you would be left with words for which the italics has
no meaning, other than to indicate that this word is more *important*
than the others; this "remainder" is what <em> is for. Given such a
perfect set of tags, <i> would indeed be redundant - for every
instance of <i>, you could choose a more specific tag - but because a)
there aren't tags for everything and b) people are lazy, <i> remains a
catch-all case.
In my view, you don't need to do this process of exclusion, because
emphasis/highlighting importance is a definable use of italics in its
own right, and is naturally and obviously distinct from other uses.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]