[Mediawiki-l] Re: Rendering of italics

[Lengyel, Florian]

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

>> Things are in italics for *a variety of reasons*; things should only
>> be in <em> tags for *one of those reasons*.

And John Blumel asked:

>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?

Permit me to propose a perhaps uninformed but pragmatic answer:
I sometimes want a box around some text in the typewriter font. This is
accomplished by indenting the text (in other words, by not starting in the
first
column) in the edit window. I may have a blank line in between text that I
want
surrounded by a single box, as follows

But the blank line will close the box around the preceding paragraph, and
a new surrounding box will appear after the blank. To make the blank line
appear and not create two boxes, I can instead
insert an italic space where the blank line was with this syntax:
'' ''
Now this paragraph and the preceding one will be included in the same
bounding box.

Of course, I could have used ''' ''' instead of '' '' on the blank line; in
that
case, my answer applies to a variant of John Blumel's question, in which the
phrase
"bold face" replaces the word "italics." 

FL