From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailout.scc.kit.edu (mailout.scc.kit.edu [129.13.185.202]) by krisdoz.my.domain (8.14.5/8.14.5) with ESMTP id s7EFDxcb000609 for ; Thu, 14 Aug 2014 11:14:00 -0400 (EDT) Received: from hekate.usta.de (asta-nat.asta.uni-karlsruhe.de [172.22.63.82]) by scc-mailout-02.scc.kit.edu with esmtp (Exim 4.72 #1) id 1XHwiy-0002IW-W0; Thu, 14 Aug 2014 17:13:57 +0200 Received: from donnerwolke.usta.de ([172.24.96.3]) by hekate.usta.de with esmtp (Exim 4.77) (envelope-from ) id 1XHwiy-0005ML-UT; Thu, 14 Aug 2014 17:13:56 +0200 Received: from iris.usta.de ([172.24.96.5] helo=usta.de) by donnerwolke.usta.de with esmtp (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1XHwiy-0004CO-Sg; Thu, 14 Aug 2014 17:13:56 +0200 Received: from schwarze by usta.de with local (Exim 4.77) (envelope-from ) id 1XHwiE-0002Yw-DU; Thu, 14 Aug 2014 17:13:10 +0200 Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 17:13:10 +0200 From: Ingo Schwarze To: Jason McIntyre Cc: tech@mdocml.bsd.lv Subject: Re: mdoc(7): improve description of .Em and .Sy Message-ID: <20140814151310.GC29858@iris.usta.de> References: <20140813212212.GG26534@iris.usta.de> <20140814065720.GB7407@harkle.home.gateway> X-Mailinglist: mdocml-tech Reply-To: tech@mdocml.bsd.lv MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20140814065720.GB7407@harkle.home.gateway> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) 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:

Cats are cute animals.

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):

Cats are cute animals.

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):

Cats are cute animals.

[...] 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 not matched by the pattern" or "Warning: 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 -- To unsubscribe send an email to tech+unsubscribe@mdocml.bsd.lv