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

[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.