On 4/25/05, John Blumel <johnblumel(a)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]