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jackI'm fairly sure I use bold, italic and *starred* in subtly different ways. I'm often fascinated by such subtle distinctions, such as the subtleties in translating into one of two related words.
The thing is, I can't put my finger on what the differences might be. (The nearest I've come is in observed starring can star two consecutive words separately, or as part of a phrase, which is occasionally useful.) Does anyone recognise a difference in themselves?
I was reminded of this by the idea in html that you have a semantic tag, eg. em for emphasis, and a mapping from that to display, where the mapping could be overridden. Which is definitely the right way, but not yet universal. And part of the reason I'm slow in adopting is that having acquired subtle differences, I don't like losing them, even if it would make sense. After all, if I can't explain them, I can't persuade anyone to make a tag for them :)
A tag for citation, a common usage of italic, makes sense, as often that is represented in a specific way on different web-pages, or in different ways in a piece of text, (eg. in theory, nested cite tags might helpfully do different things). And I can certainly live with only one form of textual emphasis, I use none at all in formal writing. But I don't like to :) And I have a nagging feeling that if I write em, then someone who hasn't configured their web browser might see it as bold[1], and think I was shouting, whereas I'd only meant italic, and it's quite different :)
[1] That is a difference, that bold stands out of the page a lot more, whereas italic doesn't. So both serve some function. I am confused with google chat because it renders starred text as bold, and I use stars both for actions (*hug*) which should be bold and emphasis (I *did* say that) which shouldn't, at least in my writing :)
The thing is, I can't put my finger on what the differences might be. (The nearest I've come is in observed starring can star two consecutive words separately, or as part of a phrase, which is occasionally useful.) Does anyone recognise a difference in themselves?
I was reminded of this by the idea in html that you have a semantic tag, eg. em for emphasis, and a mapping from that to display, where the mapping could be overridden. Which is definitely the right way, but not yet universal. And part of the reason I'm slow in adopting is that having acquired subtle differences, I don't like losing them, even if it would make sense. After all, if I can't explain them, I can't persuade anyone to make a tag for them :)
A tag for citation, a common usage of italic, makes sense, as often that is represented in a specific way on different web-pages, or in different ways in a piece of text, (eg. in theory, nested cite tags might helpfully do different things). And I can certainly live with only one form of textual emphasis, I use none at all in formal writing. But I don't like to :) And I have a nagging feeling that if I write em, then someone who hasn't configured their web browser might see it as bold[1], and think I was shouting, whereas I'd only meant italic, and it's quite different :)
[1] That is a difference, that bold stands out of the page a lot more, whereas italic doesn't. So both serve some function. I am confused with google chat because it renders starred text as bold, and I use stars both for actions (*hug*) which should be bold and emphasis (I *did* say that) which shouldn't, at least in my writing :)
no subject
Date: 2008-02-24 05:58 am (UTC)Having said that, I hardly use the italic notation because my first thought on seeing it is 'Regex!'. When I'm writing somewhere that accepts proper bold etc. I use the symbols as a half measure, for slight emphasis. And also for actions (*hug*). Underscores as underline is useful when I want to make it very clear that the text is not a link.
The normal display is -> italic, -> bold. The easiest way I find to think about it is that and are pronounced the same as normal text, whereas and are not. Most of the non-emphasis bolding I do is already wrapped with some other tag, so I use CSS.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-24 06:03 am (UTC)Normal mapping:
<em> -> italic
<strong> -> bold
<b> and <i> are pronounced the same as normal text. <em> and <strong> are not.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-25 03:26 pm (UTC)And ditto on the second para, especially regex.
em->italic, etc, would make sense, but I'm not sufficiently confident of it. (It may be ok, but I'm not sufficiently sure; most words acquire connotations, so em and bold, which no-one ever sees, may not be sufficiently instantiated in meaning except in subcultures which use them a lot.)