Re: I and B vs EM and STRONG

to follow up on what Chris Kreussling said:

> I agree that for the many instances where italics are the
> preferred or standard means of text representation, authors
> should strive to tag the semantics of the text rather than its
> textual representation. For example: inclusion of a word or
> phrase in another language, such as a latin phrase in a legal
> document, can be tagged with <SPAN LANG="...">. Other
> semantics, such as a scientific name of a plant or animal, may
> not have satisfactory representation in HTML and will require
> XML/XSL for a more general solution.

Please add RDF to your toolkit for building that solution.  

It may provide a means of connecting the semantics, and the
solutions using concept graphs captured in RDF schemas may work
better or be better accepted than solutions which are limited to
other media in their defining scripts.

For scientific names, a <SPAN CLASS="botany"> can be used to wrap
"vinca minor" but it would seem that RDF could be brought to play
to capture the semantics "as used in" that binds the
CLASS="botany" name usage to, for example, a botanical dictionary
or standard text where the name is explained further.  And yes,
it can also be done in XML with namespaces as in <SPAN
terminology:domain="botany" etymology:base-lang="LA"
terminology:definitive-reference="(Dublin Core or ISBN URI for an
authoritative source)">.

Al

> 
> <author>Chris Kreussling</author> 
> <disclaimer>The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.</disclaimer>
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 17 November 1998 12:50:05 UTC