Re: Foreign Words and Phrases

On Mon, 22 Sep 1997, Markku Savela wrote:

> The following prompts me to comment..
> 
> > > <I lang="it">Lega Nord<I>
> > Yes, clearly deprecated.
> 
> ... it is a convention to display scientific names of organisms in
> Italic. Until styles are fully supported I have been considering
> something like following
> 
> 	<i class=species>Achillea millefolium</i>
> 
> which would give correct result on non-style browser. Using <em> would
> not be correct here, as I specifically want "italic", and not any
> emphasis!
> 
> Thus, sometimes <i> and <b> are better suited for the applications
> than the logical <strong> and <em>.

I'm really not sure. Emphasis doesn't mean that this is semantically
of (highest) importance. In my eyes, it just means "this is somewhat
different from the rest, important enough of a difference to warrant
that this difference shows up somehow". As for specific italic, the
cases where italic exists but isn't used for <EM> are probably rather
small, too small to justify the costs of presentational markup.


> Can 'class' imply attributes? Might be nice if 'species' could imply
> lang=latin so that I wouldn't need to repeat that for each element?
> (e.g. language inherited from the class too?). Is this "a can of
> worms", to extend styles so that class could be used to add element
> attributes?

Very good question, with a good examlpe. I have recently asked
for this functionality in the CSS working group, but without having
such a good example. I don't know yet whether, how, and when that
might go into CSS.

There is however discussion in the CSS WG for style derived from
attributes. I.e. you could say that anything that has LANG=latin
is to be styled in italic or so. That may help in your case
(if you have no other latin than species names, or if the other
cases are not too numerous and can have a CLASS attribute), or
it may not really help.


Regards,	Martin.

Received on Monday, 22 September 1997 08:08:40 UTC