Have you read _This Book_?

[pne]

It annoys me slightly when people write in HTML and underline book titles such as, say, Animal Farm.

As far as I know, "proper" typography used italics for book titles, and underlining is merely a necessity forced on users of typewriters who had no separate italics typeface. Well, guess what: in HTML you do have an "italics" tag! So I consider it proper to italicise titles (Animal Farm).

In the spirit of semantic markup, I suppose a separate tag would be better, but I can't think of one whose meaning matches, so I just use the generic <i> tag. (Which I also use for, say, marking up foreign words that are still perceived to be foreign, when I do so, as in vice versa.)

Comments

[sparkofcreation.livejournal.com]

Yep, it annoys me too. :-)

You consider "vice versa" to be foreign? Or do you mean, just when you write in German it's considered foreign?

What I'll never understand is why some people feel the need to differentiate between the <em> tag and the <i> tag, or between the <strong> tag and the <bold> tag. I once had a friend edit some HTML for my web page (this was back before CSS; heck, it was back when the use of frames was highly controversial) and he insisted it was no longer preferred to use the <i> tag and changed all my <i>'s to <em>'s.

[pne.livejournal.com]

You consider "vice versa" to be foreign?

Kind of. At least, when I'm in the mood for marking up Latin-derived phrases. I'd also be inclined to italicise versus in such cases.

What I'll never understand is why some people feel the need to differentiate between the <em> tag and the <i> tag, or between the <strong> tag and the <bold> tag.

Hm. I tend to try to use <em> and <strong> when appropriate, i.e. when emphasising some word or words, and to use the meaningless <i> and <b> when I'm using them because certain things are italicised or bold by convention. In general, I try to mark up my HTML by semantics, e.g. using <h2> instead of font tags to make a normal paragraph bigger and bold.

i, b, u (and s/strike, which isn't in HTML 4 Strict IIRC, though the others are) are kind of "warts" in HTML, since in general, it tries to mark up structure, not presentation.

heck, it was back when the use of frames was highly controversial

You mean it isn't now? :)

he insisted it was no longer preferred to use the <i> tag

That's my understanding, too—at least among people who take HTML semi-seriously and don't just slap together a layout in MS FrontPage by eye, regardless of the code produced.

and changed all my <i>'s to <em>'s.

Now that I wouldn't do, and I don't like HTML editors that italicise text by putting "em" tags around it. Usually, italics are used for emphasis, and bold text for strong emphasis, but not always! So you can't just go and replace all i's with em's because then you're claiming that all this text is emphasised, which may not be true.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The suggestion that HTML is logical markup is rather ridiculous, frankly, once you've seen something like DocBook. HTML is physical markup with pretensions.

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

Kind of. At least, when I'm in the mood for marking up Latin-derived phrases. I'd also be inclined to italicise versus in such cases.

I agree on all points. The words I tend to italicise most are versus, ergo (both Latin, as you do) and vis-à-vis (French in that case) - also the interjection n'est-ce pas, which I use a lot. And underlining? Please. :) Usually I resort to underlining only when emphasising in bold italics just isn't enough...

[liv]

Yeah, I'm kind of annoyed by the way that HTML standards are moving away from <i> and preferring <em>. They're not the same thing. Sometimes the actual semantic thing I want to do is italicize text, and sometimes I want to emphasize and am happy to use the convention that italics provide emphasis, but to separate presentation from semantics like you're supposed to. Like binomial names for organisms, for example; Homo sapiens is meant to be in italics, it's not meant to be emphasized every time you want to use it!

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

The difference is supposedly for screen-readers, but how many of them actually do differentiate between <i> and <em> / <b> and <strong> I don't know...

[pthalo]

In Bibliographies for school, both in the states and now that I'm in Hungary, I've always had to italicise names of articles or pieces of work and underline complete volumes. This is entire works are distinguished from pieces. For example, "I really love the song Crucify off Tori Amos' album Little Earthquakes."

But I hate seeing stuff underlined in HTML regardless because I always think it's a link.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Interesting; the convention I learned was to put the titles of, say, articles in a book in quotes and the title of the book in italics. I'd imagine that songs and albums would work similarly.

[bobert225.livejournal.com]

With books, it should be underlined only if you're hand-writing the title, italics if you're typing it.

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

Regardless of the reasons that underlining came to be used, it's definitely now considered correct. For example, the guide I have in my hands right now (I just looked to make sure I wasn't wrong) uses underlines instead of italics. Plus, I have yet to be smacked by any of my professors, including the notoriously picky English professors.

So nyah.

The correct tag is cite

[jordik.livejournal.com]

One of the uses of <cite> is to mark titles, as in Animal farm.

A user stylesheet can then determine how it is displayed.

Re: The correct tag is cite

[pne.livejournal.com]

Hm... for book titles, you may actually be right.

I used to think that <cite> was pretty useless since I didn't understand what it could "properly" be used for. (For example, I used to use it to quote other people until it was pointed out to me that that was not what it was intended for.)

However, for things such as binomial names for organisms (see livredor's example of Homo sapiens), there's no better tag than <i>—or, if you prefer, <span style="font-style: italic">.

Re: The correct tag is cite

[jordik.livejournal.com]

Oh, for quotes you'd use either <q> or <blockquote>, depending on length. The cite tag plays well with both:

Come my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Tennyson

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why.

Albert Einstein

Of course cite is also an attribute, when the citation is a URI. User agents should allow this link to be followed:

LiveJournal is a simple-to-use (but extremely powerful and customizable) personal publishing ("blogging") tool, built on open source software.

As for binomial names: I can't really think of a tag that would suit them well, but neither I nor SPAN seem correct. I'd use something like <em class="binname">Homo sapiens</em> probably.

<I>, <B>, <S>, <U> are not tags which should be used, ever — but they cannot and should not be replaced with <EM>, <STRONG> etc. automatically either.

Incidently, I wish there were some clear (logical, not visual) distinction between EM and STRONG…