Hi All, Lee states some interesting facts and thoughts: 1) there is no true consensus 2) semantic mark up (em or \emph) are there to show emphasis not italic 3) if em is used and it is output is italic there is no difference 4) the distinction is purely made by the reader or speaker. So what we are left with is that the discussion is philosophical. YET, the actual problem is not truly seen. We have two problems here 1) production of a text 2) coverting an already printed text to a mark up electronic version During 1 it is better to use a command like emphasis so that when the end product is released there is a consistent use of emphasis through out the text. While in 2 we can ONLY assume that emphasis was intended by the author/producer/publisher! It is inappropriate to use the semantic mark up of emphasis unless we intend to impose an interpretation of the text. Last but not least, if a emphasis command is implemented properly there should be other typographical changes to the text being formatted so that it is contrasted more in the text in order to make it stand out more! In other words you should be able to see the difference between italics and emphasis. I will iterate once more emphasis is not a html design mistake (maybe its implementation). TeX had the \emph-command before HTML. It can be (though you should not) redefine to suite the authors needs and likes. regards Keith. Am 14.10.2011 um 22:59 schrieb Lee Passey:
Read carefully; I'm agreeing with you almost completely, I'm just exploring some of the subtleties.
On Thu, October 13, 2011 5:15 pm, Jim Adcock wrote:
I think if one goes back to typographic usage in previous centuries one finds that use of italic vs. non-italic is intended as *contrastive* not *emphasis*
I think you're probably right. I can see old Johann himself being confronted by one of his typesetters saying "our client wants this text differenciated from its surrounding gothic text, how do we do it", and Johann replying "just use those new leads we got from Aldine Press in Italy".
-- that the notion of "*emphasis*" is yet-another html design mistake.
Well, whether it is a mistake is by no means a consensus opinion, but I tend to agree with you. HTML 2.0 was primarily presentational markup; it was used to indicate how things should look. As HTML has evolved, its "owners" realized that it would be more powerful if it were semantic instead, indicating what linguistic meaning a phrase had irrespective of presentation. I suspect there was some sort of knee-jerk reaction where someone said "<i> is presentational, we need semantic markup, italics are used for emphasis, let's replace <i> with <em>." If you look closely at this last sentence, you will see a syllogistic fallacy akin to "All men are mortal, Socrates is mortal, therefore, all men are Socrates."
For example a brief non-italic section might be found within an italic section to show *contrast* -- it certainly wasn't intended that the non-italic section be UN-"emphasized" -- nor was the long-italic section intended to imply the entire section was to be *emphasized* -- rather the long italic section was simply intended to be *contrastive.*
This is a fairly cogent explanation of the issue. I have no problem with the <em> tag, but I /do/ have a problem with the notion that it is a replacement for <i>, and I think that <i> should /not/ be deprecated. Italics are frequently used in text to indicate a character's thought process; and while it's possible to think /emphatically/, not all thoughts are emphatic, nor are all things emphasized thoughts.
The distinction between italics and emphasis, however, /is/ useful. The important thing to remember about HTML in particular, and XML in general, is that it is not designed to be used by humans, it is designed to be used by computers; and one of those uses is in synthetically generated speech. A text-to-speech engine should make no distinction between italicized and non-italicized text when the italics are used to indicate the name of a ship, but /should/ add stress when the italics are used to indicate emphasis.
Sometimes when contrast was printed it *was* intended to be read as emphasis, but that reading is supplied in context by the reader not by the typography.
True, but it's important to recognize that the typographical contrast was required for the reader to recognize that a contextual interpretation was necessary. At that point a relatively well trained human is required to indicate what interpretation is appropriate. When no human is available (as when you have a text to speech enginer) things start to get messy.
Maybe Watson could intuit context from bare contrast, but for the foreseeable future I don't see how you can proceed without a human in the loop. But semantic markup allows a human to indicate the interpretation concretely before the computer gets involved. Therefore, I think that
"The <i>Queen Mary</> sailed <em>last</em> night!"
is both appropriate and desirable markup. (As an exercise for the reader, how would one mark up the foregoing text if it were thought rather than said?)
As often the italic is simply intended to represent *some* kind of *difference.* Only recently have we found the desire of writers to make everything explicitly *emphatic* for the "sake of the reader" -- with html unfortunately only too happy to oblige!
Certainly this happens, but I don't think HTML is at fault; it's abuse of HTML that is at fault. Much of the blame goes to the users, who try to make HTML behave like PDF, trying to specify exactly how they want the document to look without regard to what the document /is/, but some of the blame goes to the W3C whose advice is "use <em> instead of <i>", when in fact it should be "use <em> for emphasis and <i> to contrast a span of text from the surrounding text."
The solution to the problem is not to avoid HTML--the same problems will arise with any markup language. The solution is to teach people how to use HTML correctly. HTML for e-books is actually fairly simple to learn and use if people would just overcome the knee-jerk reaction against that seems to be deeply engrained in a lot of people.
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