Brian Heinrich and Brant Gurganus --
/Please/ edit your quotes. There's so much extraneous text in your
replies, it's difficult to find the text of your messages.
This argument on marking up citations is caused by HTML's shortcomings
as a semantic markup language. In DocBook, which is a much richer and
better designed markup language, your examples can be marked up as
follows:
This:
Tolkein, J. R. R. <i>The Hobbit</i>. Place: Publisher, date.
can be written:
Tolkein, J. R. R. <citetitle>The Hobbit</citetitle>. Place:
Publisher, date.
This citation:
'Is not the attitude of the heroes of <i>MASH</i>, however,
precisely that of an active <i>disidentification</i>?'
(Žižek, <i>Plague</i> 22).
as this:
'Is not the attitude of the heroes of <citetitle>MASH</citetitle>,
however, precisely that of an active
<emphasis>disidentification</emphasis>?'
<citation>(Žižek, <citetitle>Plague</citetitle>
22)</citation>.
And this bibliographic entry:
<p style="text-indent: -1em; margin-left: 1em;">Žižek,
Slavoj. <i>The Plague of Fantasies</i>. Wo Es War. Ed.
Žižek. Verso. London: New Left Books, 1997.</p>
as this:
<bibliomixed>Žižek, Slavoj. <citetitle>The Plague of
Fantasies</citetitle>. Wo Es War. Ed. Žižek.
Verso. London: New Left Books, 1997.</bibliomixed>
(It's not a paragraph, btw, so even in HTML you shouldn't put in in
<p>.)
Whether titles should be underlined or italicized now becomes
irrelevant; it's handled by stylesheets, so I can make the page look
like a manuscript or a published book at whim.
(DocBook can do a lot more than the bare minimum here. For example,
there's a 'pubwork' attribute for <citetitle> that you can use to
distinguish between books and articles and such so that the style-
sheets only italicize book titles and not article titles--but I
won't go into that.)
Now that the parenthetical citations are marked as such, I can reduce
the font and make the text gray so they don't stand out as much:
citation {font-size: smaller; color: gray}
and I can give bibliographic entries a hanging indent:
bibliomixed {text-indent: -2em; padding-left: 2em}
Now, as for <i>, using it tells me nothing useful. If you put both
titles and emphasis in <i>, then how am I to know whether it's a title
I'm processing or an emphasized phrase--or a ship's name, or a foreign
phrase, or a thought-speech in a SciFi story? I can't very well put all
titles in moss green and ship's names in marine blue if you don't
distinguish between them.
And then there's also this enlightened html reader that assumes <i> =
<em> and keeps stressing the titles in all of Brian Heinrich's
parenthetical citations.
~fantasai
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