[Mediawiki-l] Rendering of italics

[Brion Vibber]

Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> One thing I noticed after resurrecting the test suite: text in
> double tics is now rendered as "<i>" instead of "<em>".  Was this
> a consciously-made change, or just an error introduced into the
> parser at some point?

<em> is semantic markup, and does not represent "italics" but rather
"emphasis".

Since '' are generally referred to as "italics" and quite routinely used
as a typographic cue to represent other semantic roles conventionally
marked with italic type such as ship names, poem and film titles,
captions, foreign words, abbreviations, quotations, comments, set-off
replies, etc, producing the <em> element for '' was an abuse of the
semantic markup.

One of the most important things about semantic elements is that they
should *not* be diluted by use for purely typographic roles, which
destroys any semantic role they could have carried. HTMTL's <i> element
has exactly the right semantics to translate the '' wiki tag: a
presentational markup element which makes no claim on any particular
meaning.

Now, hypothetically we could spend a lot of time and effort trying to
teach people not to use '' for anything but emphasis and tell people to
use other markup explicitly, but that would be a losing battle. I
corrected it to output the always-semantically-correct <i> some time ago
for the 1.4 branch.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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