[Mediawiki-l] Re: Rendering of italics

[Rowan Collins]

On 4/25/05, John Blumel <johnblumel at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Freak examples don't really prove the point. One could just as easily
> em everything in a text and the few scattered non em'd words would
> suddenly be significant. 

Ah, but then "em" would no longer mean "emphasis" would it? Even with
the usage reversed, "i" continues to mean "italic", because that is
its only meaning.

> This is basically telling the reader: "I'm
> reversing the rules of significance. That which is marked as
> significant is not. That which is not marked as significant is."

That's not true - if presented with a page in italic script, with
certain words un-italicised, you will not think "oh, this whole page
is emphasised" because that is meaningless - emphasised when compared
to what? The parts which are in *non-italics* will automatically stand
out - and thus be emphasised.

Intriguingly, an XHTML + CSS approach to markup can handle this perfectly:

<style>
p {font-style: italic;}
em {font-style: normal;}
</style>

This defines ordinary text (in a plain paragraph) to be italic, and
emphasised text (in <em> tags) to be non-italic. For a rather poor
example, look at http://195.137.84.82/~ron/em_it.html

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]