On Nov 08, 2010, at 10:43 AM, Fritz Anderson <fri...@manoverboard.org> wrote:
On 7 Nov 2010, at 11:16 PM, LuKreme wrote:
You don't. <i> and <b> should not be used.
This is the case when the intended semantics of the markup is that emphasis and strong emphasis are to be
indicated, and you don't care how the renderer accomplishes it. Sometimes, however, the intended semantics are
that the text be rendered as the author intends. In legal citation, the name of the case MUST BE IN ITALICS. When
you say "Brown v. Board of Education," you don't mean to say it emphatically, you mean to set it in
italics. <i> and <em> mean different things, and treating them as though <em> is just the New!
Improved! Modern! <i> is naïve and wrong.
Alas, this is a terrible example for your case - because there is a specific semantic
tag for citations, <CITE>, which should be used for such things. Among other
things, it makes it much easier for things like screen readers and indexing tools to
parse the document properly.
I had an argument with a friend of mine who does a lot of e-book work about
this, just a few days ago. I'm a strong supporter of semantic markup whenever
possible, for precisely this reason - formatting markup should be based on
semantic meaning whenever possible, so that the underlining meaning can be
directly accessed by software tools. However, I also had to acknowledge my
friend's point that there are so many semantic uses for boldface/italic that
they realistically can't be covered by pure semantic markup - ship names,
interior thoughts/monologue, etc. etc.
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