[whatwg] The m element [em and strong]

David Latapie david at empyree.org
Thu Feb 8 15:16:40 PST 2007


On Thu, 08 Feb 2007 23:53:15 +0100, Øistein E. Andersen wrote:
> David Latapie écrivit:
> 
>> Do you mean than focus is another subset of emphasis?
> 
> If you mean whether I think <m> conveys some sort of emphasis, then 
> the answer
> is yes.

You answered my question

> I do not argue that a distinction between emphasis indicated by the
> author and emphasis added afterwards is necessarily a bad idea, though.

Interesting idea.

>> An example where there is emphasis without importance is the 
>> “highlighting” of foreign words [...]:
> 
> Are they really not important? See Fowler below.
> As for screen readers, would it not be appropriate to read
> foreign words with an initial hesitation, slightly reduced
> speed or some other very slight emphasis?

I was just thinking accent, but I have very few information on the way 
they are working. I agree that “a few hesitation” is much easier to 
implement than the actual accent (which would require a huge database) 
and I can live with it.

> /Morrión/ is the Spanish word for what is (according to my 
> dictionary) usually
> written /morion/ in English.

I admit I just looked on Wikipedia, based on the French word morion. I 
mixed it up for a reason to long and too uninteresting to explain, but 
that ruined the example :/

> Let me quote from Fowler's /Modern English Usage/:

Thank you for this interesting reading. Secondarily, that shows that 
lexicalised foreign word shall not be italicised, as they are not 
supposed to grab the reader's attention (of course, this is context 
sensitive: “this place has a krast geology - by the way /krast/ is a 
Slovene word” - in the first occurence, the word is considered as 
English, it is lexicalised. In the second one, it is considered as a 
foreign word, appropriately pronounced the Slovene way)

> Therefore, defining <strong> as denoting importance and pretending
> that the two are completely dissociated entities is unlikely to be 
> productive.

Well, I never had this intention <emph val="+1"> <emph val="+2">.
-- 
</david_latapie>             U+0F00
http://blog.empyree.org/en (English)
http://blog.empyree.org/fr (Français)
http://blog.empyree.org/sl (Slovensko)


More information about the whatwg mailing list