> I'm sure lot's of people probably use <em> when they aren't really
> emphasising something, but simply wanting to make something italic.
Absolutely! In natural science (specifically speaking about species names
here) Italics are the way to present the scientific name (genus species pair
or "senior synonym" like <i>Thorunna australis</i> or even just the species
or shorthand variations), not "emphasis". I think there is a good argument
for using <i> here as it isn't ambiguous in any way that I want italics. In
this case <em> is just semantically wrong and <i> simply should not be
deprecated.
There may be an argument for an xml structure here though:
<senior_synonym>
<genus>Thorunna</genus>
<species>australis</species>
</senior_synonym>
But in most cases we certainly don't need this as we are marking up text for
the sake of displaying text, not extraction for any other reason by any
other agent. The extra bytes are a total waste of bandwidth and when you get
to heavily used repositories of text-based factsheets like
http://amonline.net.au/fishes/fishfacts/specfam.htm or
http://seaslugforum.net/species.htm it can make quite a difference in speed
and money.
A random example http://seaslugforum.net/thoraust.htm shows how many times
species names can appear in a fact sheet (this is one of the shorter ones
and yes we are currently rebuilding this overgrown and complex data-driven
site so no comments please) and it also shows the scientific requirement for
italics in citations, but that's another argument entirely.
P
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