- From: Jukka Korpela <jkorpela@cc.hut.fi>
- Date: Fri, 19 Dec 1997 11:32:00 +0200 (EET)
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Thu, 18 Dec 1997, Sue Jordan wrote: > Taking the liberty of combining your sentences results in a > paradox for me: " Using italics is definitely the > _preferable_ presentation... [sic. although]...not > _essentially_ presentational but structural." I just don't > seem able to discern the difference between preferably > presentational and essentially presentational, even given > the taxonomic example. Oh, it's actually quite simple. Since it's a well-established habit in printed publications, taxonomic names should be presented in italics if possible, with underlining as the second option. But of course there is nothing inherently presentational in being a scientific taxonomic name. > Having just re-read RFC 2070, I don't understand why use of > the LANG attribute would not be a better answer for your > second example than keeping or adding presentational > elements. I was definitely not suggesting the addition of _presentational_ elements. I suggested keeping <I>, for presentational purposes, until we have a structural element. Naturally, using <I> just keeps things as they are, which is unsatisfactory; deprecating it without an alternative which would _at least_ handle the presentational side as reliably as <I> does doesn't look like an improvement. The LANG attribute does _not_ solve this problem. If I write "the plural of 'ox' is 'oxen'", I would do it under in the scope of LANG="en" or something like that. Using '<SPAN LANG="en">ox</SPAN>' would do no good, of course. I don't want to give the redundant information 'this is something in English' but the information 'these words are used here as objects of a language, to be preserved as such in any translation'. Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/
Received on Friday, 19 December 1997 04:32:24 UTC