[Mediawiki-l] Re: Rendering of italics

[Dan Carlson]

On Apr 23, 2005, at 10:41 PM, John Blumel wrote:

> On Apr 23, 2005, at 10:11pm, Dan Carlson wrote:
>
>> I think you're missing the point, John.  The way I've found it 
>> easiest to describe to some people is voice inflection.  If you were 
>> speaking a sentence out loud, would you speak certain words 
>> differently?  Those are the words that would apply to the "em" or 
>> "strong" tags.
>
> 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.

Okay, maybe I wasn't clear enough about this: the problem is the 
semantic meaning.  When a website author uses the "i" tag, it could 
quite possibly mean *anything*, either "em" or "cite" or "dfn" or 
"abbr" (among others, potentially).  Or it could really mean absolutely 
nothing at all, other than to tell the text to be italicized for style.

Check out this diagram: 
http://www.st-minutiae.com/temp/italicized-text.png

The goal is (or should be) to be as precise as possible in order to 
avoid confusion.  That's why it's appropriate in some cases to use 
"em", but not in *all* cases.  Let's take the following sentence:

"The <i>Defiant</i> is a tough little ship." "<i>Little?</i>" -- From 
<i>Star Trek: First Contact</i>

Contrast that with the following use of alternative markup:

"The <i>Defiant</i> is a tough little ship." "<em>Little?</em>" -- From 
<cite>Star Trek: First Contact</cite>

See the difference?  The ship name, "Defiant" is italicized, but that's 
purely a question of style.  However, Worf placed emphasis on his 
response, taking exception to the use of the word "little".  And the 
citation for the quoted exchange was the movie "Star Trek: First 
Contact".

To the naked eye, it's true that there's very little difference in 
reading each of those sentences through a web browser.  But the whole 
point of (X)HTML is to provide *semantic* markup to provide additional 
meaning to the document.  *That* is what the extra tags are for, and 
why it's important to only use them when appropriate.

See where I'm coming from now?

Dan