On Jan 10, 2007, at 11:40, fantasai wrote:
That depends, actually, on the language. Browsing the Chinese journal
section of a university East Asian Library, I noticed that the Chinese
journals didn't use normal/italics -- instead they switched the
style of
font between their equivalents of serif and cursive.
Isn't that a use case for reintroducing <font> with serif mapping to
mincho and sans-serif mapping to gothic? ;-)
Granted these switches were on a per-paragraph level in the text I
saw, but East Asian typesetting
tends not to use italics in general.
I am aware of this. But the practically locked-in Web-compatible UA
style sheet italicizes <em>, so East Asian Web authors need to deal
with that default.
They have other means of indicating emphasis: various underlining
styles,
Is there data on <u> usage on East Asian pages? Should HTML5
legitimize <u>? (For Latin pages, a restyled <u> would be more
compatible than <m>.)
bold,
Seems like a case for keeping <b> around.
(in Japanese) a switch to katakana,
Wouldn't a normal Japanese writer enter the text as katakana into the
document content instead of requesting the UA to transform hiragana
or even kanji to katakana?
East Asian texts also don't use italics for works titles: they have
a set of special punctuation for that.
I hazard a guess that it is more straight-forward, practical and
compatible to enter that punctuation in the document content than to
restyle <cite> to insert the punctuation as generated content.
You can argue that
italics and bold should be strictly equivalent to em and strong
because all
that matters is that their presentation is the same, but that
argument doesn't
hold up for non-Latin texts.
The way I see it is that speccing <i> and <em> as synonyms and <b>
and <strong> as synonyms is harmless if pages written in scripts for
which italics and bold are inapplicable don't use <i> and <b>.
Restyling <em> sitewide to use 'text-emphasis'
instead of 'font-style: italic' would be a nifty thing on a
Japanese website.
I agree.
Restyling <i> the same way would just be silly.
From a CSS perspective, there's no difference. If <em> and <i> were
defined to be semantically equivalent, there'd be no difference from
the semantic point of view either. That would leave the personal code
aesthetics that particular hand-coders associate with the identifiers
"em" and "i". If an author who control both markup and style chooses
one over the other, that's cool.
But that's still about site-wide styling. Is it too late for any of
this to have an impact on the UA style sheet?
Would it be compatible with the Web to add the following to the UA
style sheets of visual browsers?
em:lang(ja) {
font-style: normal;
text-emphasis: accent before;
}
em:lang(ja-Latn) {
font-style: italic;
text-emphasis: none;
}
If that would be compatible with the Web, would the following be?
em:lang(ja), i:lang(ja) {
font-style: normal;
text-emphasis: accent before;
}
em:lang(ja-Latn), i:lang(ja-Latn) {
font-style: italic;
text-emphasis: none;
}
--
Henri Sivonen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
