On Mon, Aug 01, 2022 at 12:56:23AM +0200, pertu...@free.fr wrote: > > What was the benefit of changing <em class="emph"> to > > <span class="r"><i class="slanted">? Isn't the former much simpler? > > It is not the same, <span class="r"> isolates from the surrounding > fonts, using <span class="r"><i class="slanted"> amounts to really doing > the same as in LaTeX (and, I believe, TeX).
I thought we still wanted a fairly simple HTML output without specifying exact details of formatting. Simpler output would make it easier for users to customize the manual with CSS, as well as any other processing they wanted to do. When would a @def* block be inheriting font styles that we would need to cancel? The 'emph' class on <em class="emph"> wasn't necessary as it wasn't coming from the @emph command (in the document, at least). But I think a special class is useful. I saw you added the "def-meta-var-arguments" class in a recent commit. It seems like there are three choices for the tag, <em>, <i> and <var>. Previously, we used <em>. I don't have a strong opinion which one is best. In the TeX output, we use slanted roman for the definition line and @var, not italics. When I checked in a web browser (Chromium), <i> and others appeared to be slanted roman, not italics. I couldn't get italics whatever I did (with a closed "a" and a tail on the "f"). (It probably depends on my default system fonts and likely other users would get true italics.) I think it would be fine to use <em> or <var> and not worry if the browser does use a true italic for these in HTML output.
