[Mediawiki-l] Re: Rendering of italics

Muke Tever muke at frath.net
Sun Apr 24 23:28:23 UTC 2005


John Blumel <johnblumel at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 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*.
>
> 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?

I had the misfortune recently to mark up the text of _Ars Grammatica
Linguae Iaponicae_ for Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders.

The entire book is printed in italics, and non-italic text is used for
cited Japanese words.

The instructions given were to mark up the text visually, retaining the
italics:

     <i>Particula, </i>ra<i>, facit pluralia [....]</i>

[Yes, like that.]
In wikimarkup that's simply:

     ''Particula, ''ra'', facit pluralia [...]''

in both cases italics are doing their job of being _visual_ markup (remaining
faithful to the original's appearance) while not contributing emphasis (as
they're not supposed to).



	*Muke!



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