Re: CSS type selector problem

Scripsit Andreas Prilop:

On Sun, 2 Sep 2007, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

The default rendering, italics and bold, is so common and taken as
so self-evident by many people that we're not very far from truth
if we say that in practice, EM and STRONG are little more than
verbose synonyms for I and B,

This may be true for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic; but most scripts on
this planet have no italics. Even the well-known German Fraktur has
no italics. In theory, a browser should find some other way to display
<EM> in Arabic, Georgian, Hindi, etc. texts. In German Fraktur,
emphasized text is s p a c e d .

(And for some languages, emphasis might be expressed by using smaller [!] font size.)

That is correct. I limited the scope to the Latin script, since _even there_ the idea of using italics and bolding as "emphasis" and "strong emphasis" is questionable and surely not universally applicable.

Things get worse if we consider other scripts as well. If we use <em> markup for, say, Hebrew text, browsers may slant Hebrew letters (to the right!). It's not right of course, but what else could they do? The point is that people who designed HTML didn't really think in terms of emphasis and strong emphasis, or at least they didn't consider their implementation for scripts other than Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic.

The bottom line really is that EM and STRONG are little more than verbose synonyms for I and B. You can use them, and I tend to use them, due to their being somewhat more logical, but they are really presentational markup in disguise and we should not expect browsers to get them right for most scripts.

You could use <em> for, say, Arabic if you use CSS to set font-style: normal (to prevent the slanting) and figure out some way to emphasize the text, e.g. using color or font size. But using <span class="em"> you could achieve just the same _except_ that when CSS is off, the emphasized text will appear as normal, not slanted.

In typography, italics is the way to emphasize text -
words or even sentences - inside serif text,
whereas bolding is used for the same purpose in sans-serif text

Huh? I have never heard or read anything like this.
Have you any reference for your claim?

It's normally expressed indirectly in typography books by explaining how italics was designed for serif fonts, how italics is the main method for emphasis in copy text (where classic typography tends to use serif fonts), how italics can be rather unnoticeable for sans-serif fonts (which may even lack genuine italics) and how bolding is a way to make sans-serif more prominent, and sans-serif fonts often have several different-weight versions to compensate for the problems of using italics.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Preferred emphasis for usage example?
    ... No highlighting does not emphasize the word at all. ... Italics alone does not seem to stand out enough. ... insofar as typical Web fonts tend to run very ... italics are the workhorse type for emphasis. ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Underlining feature in AutoFormat does Ital instead
    ... quoting displayed in italics in Help? ... "Applies bold character formatting to words enclosed in asterisks ... Strong and _Emphasis_ to Emphasis." ... The contextualized help item for that AutoFormat feature says: ...
    (microsoft.public.word.application.errors)
  • Re: pages question
    ... use Command Key + B, for italics Command Key + I, they are there in the ... add the shift key to get Bold & Italic. ... OK, until Pages, I could use bold or italic on most fonts in my font ...
    (comp.sys.mac.apps)
  • Re: Underlining feature in AutoFormat does Ital instead
    ... "Emphasis" for italics. ... "Stefan Blom" wrote in message ... > "Applies bold character formatting to words enclosed in asterisks ...
    (microsoft.public.word.application.errors)
  • Re: MeasureString gets it wrong for italics
    ... at least for the three fonts I've tried. ... that some dots in the drawn letters extend outside the reported bounding ... Microsoft Word can center italics words! ... make the X Comic San MS and it is really bad... ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.compactframework)