On Apr 24, 2005, at 4:16pm, Rowan Collins wrote:
> Things are in italics for *a variety of reasons*;
things should only
> be in <em> tags for *one of those reasons*.
And John Blumel asked:
Why would anyone choose to use italics, or why would it
ever have
become customary to do so, if some degree of emphasis from the
surrounding text wasn't the purpose?
Permit me to propose a perhaps uninformed but pragmatic answer:
I sometimes want a box around some text in the typewriter font. This is
accomplished by indenting the text (in other words, by not starting in the
first
column) in the edit window. I may have a blank line in between text that I
want
surrounded by a single box, as follows
But the blank line will close the box around the preceding paragraph, and
a new surrounding box will appear after the blank. To make the blank line
appear and not create two boxes, I can instead
insert an italic space where the blank line was with this syntax:
'' ''
Now this paragraph and the preceding one will be included in the same
bounding box.
Of course, I could have used ''' ''' instead of ''
'' on the blank line; in
that
case, my answer applies to a variant of John Blumel's question, in which the
phrase
"bold face" replaces the word "italics."
FL