Re: Is there any reason not to use <EM> for items emphasized with .Em?

[Guy Harris <guy@alum.mit.edu>]

On Aug 13, 2014, at 10:20 AM, Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de> wrote:

> But there is a second, slight problem:
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/em
> exlicitly says:
> 
>  Usage Note: Typically this element is displayed in italic type.
>  However, it should not be used simply to apply italic styling;
>  use the CSS styling for that purpose.
> 
> Which is exactly what Kristaps' code did before my commit - and note
> that i just argued myself, in my last mail, that .Em is physical,
> not semantic markup, so this advice does indeed seem to apply.

It's physical, in that it says how the text it covers should be presented, rather than what it means, but it's not italics; the man page for the mdoc macro package says

     Text may be stressed or emphasized with the `.Em' macro.  The usual font
     for emphasis is italic.

which sounds like the description of <em> on the mozilla.org site:

	The HTML <em> element (or HTML Emphasis Element) marks text that has stress emphasis. The <em> element can be nested, with each level of nesting indicating a greater degree of emphasis.

	Usage Note: Typically this element is displayed in italic type. However, it should not be used simply to apply italic styling; use the CSS styling for that purpose.

If somebody's using .Em to make something italic for reasons other than stress emphasis, that's presumably because mdoc doesn't offer a macro that does what they really want.  If they explicitly want something displayed in italics, they can use ".ft I" and ".ft"/".ft R", or "\fI" and "\fR"/"\f"; those presumably map to <i> and </i>.

So the second problem doesn't bother me; I suspect we're stuck with impedance mismatches such as that when we're going from mdoc (which isn't a language that describes only low-level rendering) to HTML (which also isn't a language that describes only low-level rendering).

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