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

[Lachlan Hunt]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Apr 2005, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>>Perhaps.  it's been argued many times before that i is the most suitable 
>>element to use for such purposes; but then again, italics for ship names 
>>is merely a typographical convention and the i element is as meaningless 
>>as span.
> 
> Actually, <i> in HTML5 is currently defined as having specific semantics:
> 
>    http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-i

So does "i" now stand for "instance", instead of "italics"?

>>  My favourite book is <a href="urn:isbn:0-735-71245-X">Eric Meyer on
>>  CSS</a>.
> 
> What if there is no appropriate link, though?

I don't know.

> Or when I can't be bothered to find out what the link is?

Then you're just being lazy :-)

> Also, there's nothing that distinguishes that <a> from other <a> elements,

Sure there is:
a[href^=urn:isbn:] { /* Styles for book titles */ }

Although, that would depend on every book being linked with an ISBN URI, 
if they were all to recieve the same styles.

> yet there is something very different about that one -- it's the title of 
> another work. I'd like to be able to style all such titles consistently, 
> so they have to be marked up in some way.

In that case, would you want to differentiate between ordinary titles 
and real citations?  Or is that something that the class attribute could 
handle, if needed?

> Movie titles are similar. I'd like my UA to give me a tooltip containing 
> information from IMDB for every movie title. With user JavaScript I can do 
> this, if there's a way to recognise movie titles.

Then would you want different markup for book titles, movie titles, play 
titles, song titles, etc?  Or would you just expect the script to search 
IMDB for anything marked up with <cite>?

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
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