Semantic markup question!

[graycyn]

*IF* you are doing semantic markup, how would you treat something like:

No! No! No!

Would you mark up each exclamation:

<em>No!</em> <em>No!</em> <em>No!</em>

or make it simpler with:

<em>No! No! No!</em>

Don't even ask why my fevered brain comes up with these kinds of questions, it just always does somehow, and then I wonder about what other people do. And it bugs me that maybe I'm not doing it right. Blame my parents. They were the ones who weren't happy when I made a 100 grade on a test. It was always, "Why didn't you get the extra-credit question for 110?"

At least I know why I'm crazy.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by graycyn

*IF* you are doing semantic markup, how would you treat something like:

No! No! No!

Would you mark up each exclamation:

<em>No!</em> <em>No!</em> <em>No!</em>

or make it simpler with:

<em>No! No! No!</em>

Don't even ask why my fevered brain comes up with these kinds of questions, it just always does somehow, and then I wonder about what other people do. And it bugs me that maybe I'm not doing it right. Blame my parents. They were the ones who weren't happy when I made a 100 grade on a test. It was always, "Why didn't you get the extra-credit question for 110?"

At least I know why I'm crazy.

<i>No! No! No!</i>

<em> is just added code bloat.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by graycyn

*IF* you are doing semantic markup, how would you treat something like:

No! No! No!

Would you mark up each exclamation:

<em>No!</em> <em>No!</em> <em>No!</em>

or make it simpler with:

<em>No! No! No!</em>

Don't even ask why my fevered brain comes up with these kinds of questions, it just always does somehow, and then I wonder about what other people do. And it bugs me that maybe I'm not doing it right. Blame my parents. They were the ones who weren't happy when I made a 100 grade on a test. It was always, "Why didn't you get the extra-credit question for 110?"

At least I know why I'm crazy.

I would use a single <em></em> wrapped about the No! No! No!.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

<i>No! No! No!</i>

<em> is just added code bloat.

Jon, you did notice that the OP mentioned semantic markup?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Jon, you did notice that the OP mentioned semantic markup?

And as we discussed over and over, <em> and <i> are exactly the same. Nobody reading that would know the difference. Semantic markup is just a meaningless term. You use the markup that fits the situation and when you want italics not in a class, you use <i>.

Besides, there's no way at all to use <em> in a class. You use italic and not emphasized italic.

And multiple tags may be needed depending on if the ! is not to be italicized.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

And as we discussed over and over, <em> and <i> are exactly the same.

Repeatedly making the same disproved declaration does not make it correct, as has been pointed out to you by many people many times.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Repeatedly making the same disproved declaration does not make it correct, as has been pointed out to you by many people many times.

Can you prove otherwise?

[Quoth]

If you are the author, you can decide if Emphasised or Italic is correct, otherwise it's very hard to decide.

so
“<em>No! No! No!</em>”
or
“<i>No! No! No!</i>”

But really neither is needed with an exclamation mark. Some might use caps
“NO! NO! NO!” he shouted.

I've seen people use bold (or strong), but really I think that's poor style, because Bold is for headings. It looks out of place in dialogue.

Obviously text books can use bold or italics to differentiate a word, and might justifiably use <em> or <strong>. However doing any styling, sematic or raw, in dialogue seems clumsy. Common enough in Georgian and Regency novels and gradually died out in the Victorian era.

Italic style is more often not used for emphasis, with telepathy or mindspeech etc you might use:
<i>No</i>! <i>No</i>! <i>No</i>!
and always omit ther dialogue quotes because the italic alone indicates it's dialogue without speech.
Italics used to be used for internal dialogue (the thoughts of a character) with quotes, but most style guides now prefer you indicate with an I/he/she thought pseudo tag. No quotes or italics.

<em> should ONLY be used for emphasis. I've seen entire books by the House of Random Penguins where the author is dead and they simply use <em> and <strong> where the paper print had italics and bold, and that's simply delusional. Maybe sometimes you can tell the semantic intention from reading the paper text of a dead author, but mostly you can't.

Use the semantic flavoured tags if you want and think it's justified. Mostly if it's spoken dialogue the enclosing quotes should be normal body style, i.e. outside the <em> or <i> or <strong> or <b>.

Really authors should decide on semantics, not purely typesetters/formatters etc, because how can they know the author's intention?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

<em> should ONLY be used for emphasis. I've seen entire books by the House of Random Penguins where the author is dead and they simply use <em> and <strong> where the paper print had italics and bold, and that's simply delusional. Maybe sometimes you can tell the semantic intention from reading the paper text of a dead author, but mostly you can't.

There's no difference in look using <em> or <i>. How would you know which the paper edition used?

Same difference with <strong> and <b>.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

There's no difference in look using <em> or <i>. How would you know which the paper edition used?

Same difference with <strong> and <b>.

That's my point. Unless the context is obvious or you talk to the author, or are the author, you can't tell.

Actually on one book I was editing the author had used a massive amount of bold everywhere (I removed it all except in headings / chapter titles) and a lot of italics in dialogue, thoughts and narration. I removed all of the italics except where the dragon was "talking" with the man. I left the dragon's mind-speech as italic and removed the quotes. I also emailed back a style guide and the author accepted all of that.

But sometimes there is value in <em> or <strong>, so I'd not argue that it's pointless.

I think non-fiction is more likely to need <em> than fiction.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

There's no difference in look using <em> or <i>. How would you know which the paper edition used?

Same difference with <strong> and <b>.

Yawn! Yes, there is no difference in visual effect unless someone has set emphasized to something other than italic—I've seen bold a few times.

OTOH, if the book is being read aloud, using <em> or <i> can give different results. Even with a human reading a paper book while they would not see the <em> or <i>, they would change their voice. You may even have noted that when reading books to children when, to use the OP's example, you would speak those words with more emphasis and/or volume while <i>USS Henry M. Jackson</i> would not get emphasis or volume.

Given that a decent majority of the authors whose books I work on now expect me to use accessibility as an important criteria, I use <em> and <i> for their different purposes. To quote from Mozilla developers forum, the <em> element represents stress emphasis of its contents, while the <i> element represents text that is set off from the normal prose. Ditto for <strong> vs <b>. And yes, a decently designed assistive reader will treat the <em> and <i> differently.

Get over yourself, Jon. Some people are concerned with more than how the book looks on their pet brand of ereader.

[Turtle91]

Jon, you constantly refuse to understand the point that “emphasis” does not always mean “italics”…that is just the default. Emphasis can be anything from color to font to underline to voice stress to normal font within an italicized phrase or whatever. “Italics” is just that, a visual slanting of the letters. There can be a big difference between the two. Just because you refuse to acknowledge, or use, the difference does not mean it isn’t there.

Please stop bringing up this argument every time someone mentions <em>.

Thank you.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

But sometimes there is value in <em> or <strong>, so I'd not argue that it's pointless.

I think non-fiction is more likely to need <em> than fiction.

How is there value in <em> and <strong>? How can non-fiction need <eM and <strong> instead of <i> and <b>? How is anyone going to know the difference. If I used a mix of <i> and <em>, without seeing the code, how would you know the which was used where? How would you even know if <i> or <em> was used?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Jon, you constantly refuse to understand the point that “emphasis” does not always mean “italics”…that is just the default. Emphasis can be anything from color to font to underline to voice stress to normal font within an italicized phrase or whatever. “Italics” is just that, a visual slanting of the letters. There can be a big difference between the two. Just because you refuse to acknowledge, or use, the difference does not mean it isn’t there.

Please stop bringing up this argument every time someone mentions <em>.

Thank you.

Have you ever seen an eBook that uses <em> where it was not just italic? I've not seen such. Oh and <i> can also be changed with CSS or you can use something like <i class="em">

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Can you prove otherwise?

Yes, I can.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Yawn! Yes, there is no difference in visual effect unless someone has set emphasized to something other than italic—I've seen bold a few times.

OTOH, if the book is being read aloud, using <em> or <i> can give different results. Even with a human reading a paper book while they would not see the <em> or <i>, they would change their voice. You may even have noted that when reading books to children when, to use the OP's example, you would speak those words with more emphasis and/or volume while <i>USS Henry M. Jackson</i> would not get emphasis or volume.

Yes, this.

I grant that we can't know the author's intentions as Quoth pointed out, but, if, as in my example, you see a "No! No! No!" you have to assume that it's meant to be emphasized in spoken speech thanks to the exclamation point alone. Are the italics needed there? With the exclamation point in place, not in my opinion, but if the author (or possibly publisher) put them there, I'm generally going to leave them be.

Sometimes it is hard to tell if something is meant to be emphasized or not in spoken speech. Italics could be used to point out a foreign language word, but it's equally possible that the author wanted vocal emphasis on that same word as well.

When in doubt, I read text aloud, to see how it sounds with and without emphasis. And then do the best I can. Which is what anyone doing the reading for an audiobook or translating a text into another language is also doing. Interpreting. The reader/translator doesn't know the author's exact intent either if the author is dead.

Anyway, I mainly was just curious about the markup, I prefer wrapping a group like this in a single tag, so I'll continue to do that.