Henri Sivonen wrote:
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? ;-)
No. It's a use case for the class attribute and style sheets. Style
sheets are *easier*, <font> tags are a *headache*.
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.
Bold is mainly used for headings. I haven't seen it used to mark phrases
inline, at least not in print.
(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?
Inasmuch as an English user would enter UPPERCASE instead of using
text-transform, yes.
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.
It also is more straight-forward, practical, and compatible
to enter quotes in the document content than to restyle <cite
class="article"> to generate curly quotes.
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.
If you define <em> and <i> to be equal, then neither of them means "emphasis".
They both mean "italics". And a tag that means "italics" shouldn't, imho,
be restyled to something else because who knows what it's being used for.
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;
}
I have no idea. It would be an interesting experiment, I suppose, once
text-emphasis is supported in a web browser.
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;
}
Are you arguing that <i> should mean "emphasis" instead of "italics"?
If so, I disagree...
~fantasai
