On Apr 23, 2005, at 5:07am, Brion Vibber wrote: One could also argue that emphasis is exactly what they are using it for. While one might disagree with how emphasis is often applied, editors don't use italics or bold because they want a word to blend into the background. John Blumel

On Apr 23, 2005, at 10:49am, Karl Eichwalder wrote: But why do you think the semantics of <i> are really any different from <em>? Frankly, I think the whole i/em, b/strong thing was a mistake in the original HTML spec. Each pair is really synonymous and having both is redundant -- and the distinctions about when to use one verses the other are completely artificial. John Blumel

On Apr 23, 2005, at 6:23pm, Brion Vibber wrote: Many of the elements in the first group do have unique meanings. However, the i/em, b/strong are synonymous in their traditional usage. You italicize and bold text because you want to emphasize it or strongly emphasize it. Reasons for i vs. em, such as that taxonomic names or foreign words are customarily italicized and blah blah blah, ignore the fact that the reason they are customarily italicized is to emphasize them. It would seem that they merely duplicated them, with different names, in each group because they couldn't decide what group they belonged in but there is no real reason to choose one over the other because the semantics are really identical and the semantic/typographic distinction is purely artificial. It's no wonder that, "people can't be educated to understand the difference." John Blumel

On Apr 23, 2005, at 10:11pm, Dan Carlson wrote: But those are exactly the same words that in a written document you would use bold or italic text for. That's what bold and italic text were invented for. And that's exactly what people use them for. One may not always agree with what is being emphasized but it's what the author chooses to emphasize. How do readers handle i and em? Do they actually say "italic", "end italic" or "emphasis", "end emphasis" or something like that, or is there some auditory cue used for these. Or do they simply read what is displayed on the page, in which case there wouldn't be any difference anyway. Even if they do read based on the HTML tags, it was still a mistake to include both i & em and b & strong. Readers would have had to be updated to handle them anyway and it could have been handled appropriately. I agree that cite, var, etc. do have semantics different from i/em. It's only the i/em and b/strong dichotomies that I think are artificial constructions without real semantic distinction. And it is the very artificiality of these constructions that has resulted in em and strong being ignored by most people. John Blumel

On Sun, 2005-04-24 at 13:20 -0400, Dan Carlson wrote: Yes, yes, we understand the concept of semantic markup, and I'm as big a proponent as any of the value of that concept; but that's not the issue here. Just because we are using HTML, that doesn't mean that our goals necessarily are HTML's goals. Our goals are ease of use and ease of editing. We use HTML because the web browser interface give us ease of use; we use wiki markup because it gives us ease of editing. It might be nice to _have_ an encyclopedia with lots of semantic markup; but if we have to sacrifice ease of editing to get there, then we won't get there. So we have to decide on reasonable trade-offs: what level of informational richness can we expect non-expert editors to deal with that will still give users the best possible experience? Clearly, if we wanted to have 100% semantic markup, we'd just use XML all the way. Then Wikipedia would have a few dozen articles by now. So we need wiki markup. Frankly, I think wiki markup has already gone too far in complexity; I haven't compiled statistics, but I'd like to see some stats along the lines of how many newcomers are editing articles compared to earlier stages (perhaps expressed as a ratio of article editors to readers?) I suspect it has gone down. Thinking about it, I agree with Brion: the actual semantic meaning of text in double-tics in wiki markup is "this is italic", and nothing else. We can't expect editors to properly use things like <cite>, <dfn>, <var>, and so on; we _can_ expect them to italicize the kinds of things they've seen in italics in all the articles they've read. Given that, the semantically correct way to render that text is with <i>, not <em>. That said, I should point out that all the arguments above apply to Wikipedia, but not necessarily to other installations of the software. -- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>

On 4/24/05, John Blumel &lt;johnblumel(a)earthlink.net&gt; wrote: No, I don't agree that that is "emphasis" in the general meaning of that term. It doesn't mean "'Defiant' is the most important word in this sentence", it means "'Defiant' is different kind of word from the others in this sentence". That's not emphasis, it's distinction. To put it even more bluntly, this is a good example where it is customary to use italics in print, but it would *not* sound correct to emphasis that word in speech. In other words, it is customary to *italicise*, but not customary to *emphasise*. -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

On 4/24/05, John Blumel &lt;johnblumel(a)earthlink.net&gt; wrote: 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] 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]

On Apr 24, 2005, at 1:28pm, Rowan Collins wrote: Well, I don't think I'm contradicting myself. The reason something is in italics is because it's being emphasized (the same purpose as em). Things aren't in italics for no reason and em has no meaning that i doesn't also have. I think the degree of hair splitting here actually makes my counter-argument. I don't see any real difference between "it's 'different, and you want to *distinguish* it" and "hey look at this, it's more important than the rest" Why do you want to distinguish it? Because it's more important than the rest. My point, and it is obviously the minority view here, is that if it is this difficult for you to draw a distinction between the meaning of i & em, and so easy for me to point out that the distinction, in each case, is artificial, then, the difference between them, if any, is so trivial as to be meaningless and that they are, for all practical purposes, semantically equivalent. John Blumel

On Apr 24, 2005, at 4:16pm, Rowan Collins wrote: 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. 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

John Blumel &lt;johnblumel(a)earthlink.net&gt; wrote: I had the misfortune recently to mark up the text of _Ars Grammatica Linguae Iaponicae_ for Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders. The entire book is printed in italics, and non-italic text is used for cited Japanese words. The instructions given were to mark up the text visually, retaining the italics: <i>Particula, </i>ra<i>, facit pluralia [....]</i> [Yes, like that.] In wikimarkup that's simply: ''Particula, ''ra'', facit pluralia [...]'' in both cases italics are doing their job of being _visual_ markup (remaining faithful to the original's appearance) while not contributing emphasis (as they're not supposed to). *Muke!

guys, please can this thread go elsewhere? It's interesting but it's not mediawiki. Thanks.