On Apr 24, 2005, at 4:16pm, Rowan Collins wrote:
Things are in italics for *a variety of reasons*;
things should only
be in <em> tags for *one of those reasons*.
Why would anyone choose to use italics, or why would it ever have
become customary to do so, if some degree of emphasis from the
surrounding text wasn't the purpose?
One can just as easily declare that things should be marked with em for
a variety of reasons. After all, there are more degrees of emphasis
than em and strong define, and many of these don't fall into any of the
other categories like cite and var. But defining the degree of emphasis
that justifies/requires em rather than i becomes rather arbitrary and
people, if forced to define it, will probably always define it at
different points. Even the exact level of emphasis that dictates when
to use em rather than strong is difficult to define exactly.
You seem to [almost] be saying "I don't
agree
with you, but you agree with me less, so I'm right".
Well, I think we both think we are right and I doubt I could say that
one of us agrees less with the other since the difference between our
points of view is the same for each of us.
John Blumel