John Blumel <johnblumel(a)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!