Typographical psuedo selectors

This is sort of a question and sort of a suggestion, 
depending.

In printing, I believe it's common that, e.g., a 
comma is italicized if the word before the comma is 
italicized. Now, let's say I'm marking up a document 
in XML, and I have a 'movie' element for marking 
movies. I don't want to have '<movie>American 
Beauty,</movie>' because the comma isn't part of the 
movie's title. However, assuming I have a style 
sheet that renders all movies in italic type, what 
can I do to italicize the comma without introducing 
extraneous markup?

I might just be nitpicking, but I think, if there's 
not a way to currently do something like this, there 
should be some thought about addressing the issue.

Set me straight here, please, and do be gentle.

-- 
John Anthony Lewis