[Mediawiki-l] Re: Rendering of italics

[Lee Daniel Crocker]

On Sun, 2005-04-24 at 13:20 -0400, Dan Carlson wrote:

> (Good examples elided) ...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.

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/>