On Apr 24, 2005, at 1:28pm, Rowan Collins wrote:
You probably didn't realise it, but you are
contradicting yourself
slightly - if you accept that a "cite" tag, or a hypothetical
"foreign" tag, has meaning (even if only a machine would care about
that meaning), then you understand that, at least sometimes, it is
useful to say *why* something is in italics. Well, if <i> just means
"it's in italics, for whatever reason" and <cite> means
"it's in
italics *because it's a citation*", how do you say "it's in italics
*because I want to emphasise it*"? The answer, in HTML, is <em>.
Well, I don't think I'm contradicting myself. The reason something is
in italics is because it's being emphasized (the same purpose as em).
Things aren't in italics for no reason and em has no meaning that i
doesn't also have.
I think the key point is that making a word italic to
emphasise an
attribute of it (e.g. its foreignness) is not the same as making it
italic to emphasise that word as against others in the text. I don't
think traditional typography uses italics for foreign phrases because,
say, "tete a tete" is always an important phrase, that you want to
draw attention to, whenever you use it; it's that it's "different",
and you want to *distinguish* it. The <em> tag is intended to
represent the kind of italics that mean "hey look at this, it's more
important than the rest".
I think the degree of hair splitting here actually makes my
counter-argument. I don't see any real difference between "it's
'different, and you want to *distinguish* it" and "hey look at this,
it's more important than the rest" Why do you want to distinguish it?
Because it's more important than the rest.
My point, and it is obviously the minority view here, is that if it is
this difficult for you to draw a distinction between the meaning of i &
em, and so easy for me to point out that the distinction, in each case,
is artificial, then, the difference between them, if any, is so trivial
as to be meaningless and that they are, for all practical purposes,
semantically equivalent.
John Blumel