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.

[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.

[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.