- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 15:46:12 +0200 (EET)
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Sat, 25 Mar 2006, David Woolley wrote: >> How is the reader expected to know whether italics is used in printed >> matter to indicate a defining occurrence, or to emphasize, or to indicate > > The reality is that, in general they do, I'm afraid that's wishful thinking. Anything that can be understood in two or more ways will be understood in the wrongest way. I don't think there is any universal convention on defining occurrences in print media. They are often highlighted, but in different ways. Remember that the use italics is rather unnoticeable for many fonts. If browsers used _different_ default styling for <dfn>, <cite>, and <var>, the message would be much clearer, and authors might have been more interested in using such markup. > <dfn> etc., give the potential for machine processing But it has not been used. Is there any reason to believe that something similar would get used when defined in a more complex environment? > An example of a house style case > is Wikipedia (which although not using <dfn>, uses bold rather than italics > for defining references). The fact that they don't use <dfn> says much about <dfn>, and about Wikipedia too, of course. -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Saturday, 25 March 2006 13:46:23 UTC