Re: I and B vs EM and STRONG

> What realy matters is to use CITE, VAR etc. when appropriate 
> and not I or EM for all "italized" words.
> 
> Some people who try to improve their documents do 
> so by replacing all their <I> with <EM>. This is an error.

Exactly.  The idea is not to use EM in place of I, but to use EM,
CITE, VAR etc as appropriate for the context.  However, there are some
cases where none of the defined syntactic phrase elements explain why
a phrase is logically italicized.  In the short term, I think there's
nothing wrong with using I in those cases, for instance <I
LANG="fr">je ne sais quoi</I>.  You could of course use a SPAN, and
stylesheets, but the intended impact will be more widely received if
you also mark the phrase up as
italics-for-a-logical-reason-not-covered-by-anything-else.  Purely
stylistic italics, such as italicized section headings, should of
course be done with the appropriate logical elements plus stylesheets.

					John T. Whelan
					whelan@iname.com
					http://www.slack.net/~whelan/

Received on Tuesday, 17 November 1998 12:35:52 UTC