Visual Media vs. Semantic Markup (was: Markdown-Discuss Digest ...)

[Jelks Cabaniss]

Jonathan Barrett wrote:

>> The problem is, italis is also used for things other than emphasis.

>> E.g., a common use for italics is to mark foreign words, but it might

>> be a bit of a _faux paux_ to put <em> around them.  Same for book

>> titles.



> I used to think like this too, but HTML is all about semantics. Your

> <cite>book titles</cite> can be italicised by appropriately styling

> semantic tags, and you can use <span class="non-english">faux</span>

> tags to mark up other things.


Exactly.  (And, BTW, `<cite>` is already by default styled as italics in
visual media.)

And to give it more explicit semantics, you can extend it -- `<cite
class="booktitle">` as, say, distinguished from `<cite class="songtitle">`,
etc. -- using whatever microformat you've developed or adopted.

Speaking of microformats and semantics, Bert Bos and Håkon Lie have an
interesting article up at <http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom>.  (The
microformats part is just past half-way down.) ...


/Jelks