Re: mdoc(7): improve description of .Em and .Sy

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Jason,

> i'm not sure what difference there is between "stress emphasis"
> and "importance". to my mind, they are the same.

Citing from 
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/CR/text-level-semantics.html

  Stress emphasis
  ---------------
  The placement of stress emphasis changes the meaning of the
  sentence.  The element thus forms an integral part of the content.
  The precise way in which stress is used in this way depends on
  the language.

  These examples show how changing the stress emphasis changes the
  meaning.  First, a general statement of fact, with no stress:

  <p>Cats are cute animals.</p>

  By emphasizing the first word, the statement implies that the kind
  of animal under discussion is in question (maybe someone is asserting
  that dogs are cute):

  <p><em>Cats</em> are cute animals.</p>

  Moving the stress to the verb, one highlights that the truth of the
  entire sentence is in question (maybe someone is saying cats are not
  cute):

  <p>Cats <em>are</em> cute animals.</p>
  [...]


  Importance
  ----------
  The "strong" element represents strong importance, seriousness,
  or urgency for its contents.

  Importance: The strong element can be used in a heading, caption,
  or paragraph to distinguish the part that really matters from
  other parts of it that might be more detailed, more jovial, or
  merely boilerplate.
  [...]

  Seriousness: The strong element can be used to mark up a warning
  or caution notice.

  Urgency: The strong element can be used to denote contents that
  the user needs to see sooner than other parts of the document.
  [...]

  Changing the importance of a piece of text with the strong element
  does not change the meaning of the sentence.

I think this distinction has usually been made in typography.  In
a professionally typeset technical manual, you might find "grep -v
selects the lines that are <em>not</em> matched by the pattern" or
"<strong>Warning:</strong> sed -i can destroy your file", but hardly
the other way round.  Even if people couldn't explain the rules, a
conforming text subconsciously helps understanding, just like good
orthography helps understanding even for people who make many
spelling errors when writing themselves.

That's not the main point of my patch, though.  Sure, I'm also
trying to make the description of .Sy (right now: "Format enclosed
arguments in symbolic" - ?!?) a bit clearer, but the main point is
to clearly mark .Em and .Sy as physical markup.

Yours,
  Ingo
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