- From: fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>
- Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 21:42:17 +1300
Henri Sivonen wrote: > On Jan 10, 2007, at 11:40, fantasai wrote: > >> That depends, actually, on the language. Browsing the Chinese journal >> section of a university East Asian Library, I noticed that the Chinese >> journals didn't use normal/italics -- instead they switched the style of >> font between their equivalents of serif and cursive. > > Isn't that a use case for reintroducing <font> with serif mapping to > mincho and sans-serif mapping to gothic? ;-) No. It's a use case for the class attribute and style sheets. Style sheets are *easier*, <font> tags are a *headache*. >> They have other means of indicating emphasis: various underlining styles, > > Is there data on <u> usage on East Asian pages? Should HTML5 legitimize > <u>? (For Latin pages, a restyled <u> would be more compatible than <m>.) > >> bold, > > Seems like a case for keeping <b> around. Bold is mainly used for headings. I haven't seen it used to mark phrases inline, at least not in print. >> (in Japanese) a switch to katakana, > > Wouldn't a normal Japanese writer enter the text as katakana into the > document content instead of requesting the UA to transform hiragana or > even kanji to katakana? Inasmuch as an English user would enter UPPERCASE instead of using text-transform, yes. >> East Asian texts also don't use italics for works titles: they have a >> set of special punctuation for that. > > I hazard a guess that it is more straight-forward, practical and > compatible to enter that punctuation in the document content than to > restyle <cite> to insert the punctuation as generated content. It also is more straight-forward, practical, and compatible to enter quotes in the document content than to restyle <cite class="article"> to generate curly quotes. >> Restyling <i> the same way would just be silly. > > From a CSS perspective, there's no difference. If <em> and <i> were > defined to be semantically equivalent, there'd be no difference from the > semantic point of view either. That would leave the personal code > aesthetics that particular hand-coders associate with the identifiers > "em" and "i". If an author who control both markup and style chooses one > over the other, that's cool. If you define <em> and <i> to be equal, then neither of them means "emphasis". They both mean "italics". And a tag that means "italics" shouldn't, imho, be restyled to something else because who knows what it's being used for. > But that's still about site-wide styling. Is it too late for any of this > to have an impact on the UA style sheet? > > Would it be compatible with the Web to add the following to the UA style > sheets of visual browsers? > > em:lang(ja) { > font-style: normal; > text-emphasis: accent before; > } > > em:lang(ja-Latn) { > font-style: italic; > text-emphasis: none; > } I have no idea. It would be an interesting experiment, I suppose, once text-emphasis is supported in a web browser. > If that would be compatible with the Web, would the following be? > > em:lang(ja), i:lang(ja) { > font-style: normal; > text-emphasis: accent before; > } > > em:lang(ja-Latn), i:lang(ja-Latn) { > font-style: italic; > text-emphasis: none; > } Are you arguing that <i> should mean "emphasis" instead of "italics"? If so, I disagree... ~fantasai
Received on Thursday, 11 January 2007 00:42:17 UTC