Re: [XHTML 2.0] emphesis

Jonathan Worent schreef:
> Thats along the lines of what I was thinking. It would
> be a matter of i18n to best represent this in other
> languages.
>    level -1 - progressivly decreasing text size from
>               here down.
>    level  0 - normal
>    level  1 - italic
>    level  2 - bold italic
>    level  3 - bold italic and increasing text size  
>               progressively form here
> I suppose it would be best to try to match typical
> voice inflections as closely as possible for aural
> browsers.

Ok, in real documents, like books, magazines, papers, etc. How often do 
they use smaller and larger text to indicate different degrees of 
emphasis than italics and bold?

I don’t think are any typographical conventions for such differences in 
expressing emphasis. It is such an obscure thing, I really don’t think 
it has a place in a general document markup language for on the web.

Once you go down that road, you’ll end up with a document format like 
DocBook or worse, having such a mass of elements to indicate every 
possible meaning that you can possibly think of, that it’ll become 
confusing, it’ll become a terrible ordeal for even the smartest author 
to know about all the elements that are available and properly mark up 
his document (tons of people already have trouble with the current 
limited set), and the bulk of the elements available will hardly be used 
at all by document authors.

There are already a lot of elements like that, e.g. <dfn> and <cite>, 
but at the least they have a clear and useful purpose in serious 
applications of a document format (generating indexes, etc).


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.