b and i

[Fred Condo]

On May 14, 2004, at 4:57 PM, Aaron Swartz wrote:

> http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2004/05/02/b-and-i
>
> More often, people switch from i to em for everything they want 
> italicized, and from b to strong for everything they want in bold. 
> Authoring software often does this — tools like the original Wiki, 
> Wikipedia, and Markdown make it easy to use em and strong, and harder 
> (or impossible) to use i, b, or any of the other italic or bold 
> elements.
>
> This is bad.

He's wrong about language, for sure, and wrong in the long term about 
everything, because of MathML and TaxonML (ok, I made that one up).

<p>She has a certain <span xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">je ne sais 
quoi</lang>.</p>

Should it be easy to use i and b? Perhaps, because usability is good. 
But not for the reasons cited. Thomas's two specific examples (taxa and 
vectors)  are for highly technical fields that either have or ought to 
develop a markup language for their semantics.