[whatwg] [web-apps] 2.7.8 The i element

[Anne van Kesteren]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> Is there any advantage to marking up people's names?

Not really. As there is no way to distinquish two people sharing the
same name. Furthermore, it would only be useful for the few who "love
semantics", since names are typically not rendered any different from
other paragraph text.


> Maybe we should just let ship names be marked up by <i> (it is, after
> all, an instance of use of a term, as it were), and say that <cite> 
> can be used for any reference to a publication, including those that 
> aren't really citations ("my favourite book is <cite>...</cite>").

We need italics for other things as well:

# Looking over the index entry for "Italics" in my Chicago Manual of
# Style, I see that italics can be used for emphasis, foreign words,
# genus and species, key terms, legal cases, letters as letters and
# words as words, letters in enumeration, math, questions (as
# quotatives), rhyme schemes, ship names, stage directions, subheads,
# technical terms, theorems, and titles (of books, journals, movies,
# musical works, paintings, plays, and poems). Among other things. A
# lot of these are just typographical conventions in English that do
# not pertain in all other languages. I think this is exactly what the
# i tag was invented for.
<http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2003/09/b-svg-and-accessibility#comment-206>


-- 
  Anne van Kesteren
  <http://annevankesteren.nl/>