[Mediawiki-l] Re: Rendering of italics

[Rowan Collins]

On 4/24/05, John Blumel <johnblumel at earthlink.net> wrote:
> On Apr 23, 2005, at 10:11pm, Dan Carlson wrote:

> > For example, any of the various tags would generally be rendered in
> > italics: "cite", "var", "dfn" (for example).  But if you always used
> > the "i" tag, how would a context-less reader know whether the
> > italicized text was supposed to be a title, a variable, a definition,
> > or emphasized text?  THAT is why the "em" tag is important.
> 
> 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.

You probably didn't realise it, but you are contradicting yourself
slightly - if you accept that a "cite" tag, or a hypothetical
"foreign" tag, has meaning (even if only a machine would care about
that meaning), then you understand that, at least sometimes, it is
useful to say *why* something is in italics. Well, if <i> just means
"it's in italics, for whatever reason" and <cite> means "it's in
italics *because it's a citation*", how do you say "it's in italics
*because I want to emphasise it*"? The answer, in HTML, is <em>.

I think the key point is that making a word italic to emphasise an
attribute of it (e.g. its foreignness) is not the same as making it
italic to emphasise that word as against others in the text. I don't
think traditional typography uses italics for foreign phrases because,
say, "tete a tete" is always an important phrase, that you want to
draw attention to, whenever you use it; it's that it's "different",
and you want to *distinguish* it. The <em> tag is intended to
represent the kind of italics that mean "hey look at this, it's more
important than the rest".

The reason no-one uses <em> is, quite simply, because they don't use
the other semantic tags either - if, when you want to use italics, you
think *why*, then there will be times when <em> fits that reason
better than, say <cite>. <i> just allows you not to think about it,
because it covers both cases.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]