Re: Emphasis in East Asian scripts

On 21 September 2011 19:50, Daniel Glazman
<daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com> wrote:
> I'm attending the W3C MultilingualWeb Workshop in Limeric, Ireland,
> and a rather good question emerged related to the <em> element:
>
>  should the <em> element be rendered using ‘text-emphasis-style'
>  instead of 'font-style: italic' for East Asian languages using the
>  :lang() pseudo?

In theory default styling for <em> should depend on typographic and
typesetting traditions for various languages.

Although maybe it should be writing script based. Italicizing makes
sense for Latin and Cyrillic script languages and modern Greek. From
memory there are articles on typesetting Greek that indicate that a
traditional way of emphasizing Greek text include increasing
inter-letter spacing.

Some south east asian scripts use underlining to emphasize text,

For scripts change of text colour, font weight or typeface could be
used to emphasis text.

Its worth noting that most writing scripts have no tradition of italic
or oblique typefaces, this will be reflected in the fonts available on
various operating systems.

The default styling of the em element is rather euro-centric.

But then the default rendering of quite a few html elements fall into
the same category.

-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Senior Project Manager, Research and Development
Vicnet
State Library of Victoria
Australia

andrewc@vicnet.net.au
lang.support@gmail.com