PF> Yeah, I think were probably done on this topic. The point is that the
PF> scientific community's need for italicisation of species names IS a visual
PF> one and it predates the web by centuries.
<...>
Well, you decide, done or not :)

There is NO need to write in italic anything just for the sake of having it
italic. If you want to make something presented in different way there
should be the reason for that.
Maybe there is a centuries long tradition to italicise species
names, bet these are SPECIES NAMES you have in italics. Basically, you
have an traditional way to render words having specific semantic
meaning (if it is in italics - it is specie's name).
Sure, <em> is wrong here, you do not want to emphasize it, but
<span class="species"> is OK.

Names of the magazines and newspapers are often written in italics too.
Let's suppose you have a page with text containing both. And then you
want an automatic extraction of the magazines mentioned and the
species mentioned from the text. <em> would not help you.
<span class="magazine"> and <span class="species"> would.
Not to mention XML.
BTW, how would this text look like in XML? Would you denote
specie by <i>specie</i> or by <specie>name</specie>.

The bottom line is this: if we want to put something in different
style we do that because of the semantics.

Regards,
Rimantas


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