Re: italic fonts

I agree with Tom that italics aren't all terrible, and the point that 
different levels of emphasis can be useful is a valid one, although in 
many cases I don't think people use more than one level. It seems to me 
that many of the cases that Jon listed are areas where there is 
specific markup available - marking a span as being in another language 
that is already a priority 1 requirement in WCAG, using markup like 
cite and quote is there as priority 2, ...

I have a small phone running a partial CSS implementation (Sony 
Ericsson - I don't know what their browser is) but have found that 
italics on it are like on medium-resolution screens - readable in large 
sizes (and I have a zoom feature on the phone) but not as pretty as 
they are when printed from true type.

Which is why I use "avoid" rather than "don't". (Talking about when to 
use a size less than the user default for body text, my answer is 
"don't"...)

cheers

Chaals

On Tuesday, Oct 7, 2003, at 05:57 US/Pacific, Tom Croucher wrote:

>
> I am not sure that I agree with some of the assumptions used her. Not 
> all italics are particularly detrimental to being able to read text. 
> It entirely depends on the font. The reason for having strong and em 
> is that they provide different roles. Strong gives more weight 
> (visually and semantically) to a word, as oposed to em which is 
> commonly used to mark out key points of information. This might seem a 
> subtle distinction but it is important.
>
> My two pence,
>
> Tom
>
> On Tue, 7 Oct 2003 13:28:36 +0100, Scarlett Julian (ED) 
> <Julian.Scarlett@sheffield.gov.uk> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>> So my advice would be go with bolding if you need emphasis.
>>
>> Is there a case for doing away with <strong> altogether and having 
>> <em> display in bold by default unless specified as different in the 
>> css. It strikes me that the distinction, semantically, between <em> 
>> and <strong> is becoming rather blurred.
>>
>> Just thinking aloud..
>>
>> Julian
>>
>>
>>>
>>
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--
Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar
charles@sidar.org                                http://www.sidar.org

Received on Tuesday, 7 October 2003 09:57:28 UTC