- From: Joe English <joe@trystero.art.com>
- Date: Wed, 09 Jul 1997 10:17:57 PDT
- To: www-html@w3.org
scottm@danielson.co.uk (Scott Matthewman) wrote:
> > From: Norman Gray <n.x.gray@gcal.ac.uk>
> > True, they're preferable when you want to emphasise things, but there are
> > cases where B and I are still necessary. The most persuasive cases I've
> > seen mentioned are for species' formal names in biology, [...]
> > In none of these cases are you emphasising anything, and so inserting them
> > in an EM element would be inaccurate.
>
> How about defining subclasses and using the SPAN element?
>
> <STYLE type="text/css">
> .latin {font-style: italic; }
> </STYLE>
>
> ...in biology, <span class="latin">Homo sapiens</span>, or for foreign
> words, <span class="latin">nota bene</span>.
There are other cases where <B> and <I> are useful.
For example when converting Unix 'man' pages or legacy
word-processor documents to HTML, a conversion program
might not have any idea *why* a particular piece of text
is in italics, only *that* it's italicized. I suppose
for this case you could use <SPAN class=italic>, but that
conveys no more information that <I> would, and requires
stylesheet support in the browser.
--Joe English
joe@art.com
Received on Wednesday, 9 July 1997 13:18:21 UTC