[whatwg] <BIG> Element

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Oct 30, 2007, at 1:04 PM, Krzysztof Żelechowski wrote:
> ...
> Do EM elements accumulate?  They are idempotent under the default style
> sheet because you cannot make an italic typeface more italic.

In non-Web typography, any text that would be italicized when the 
surrounding text is roman is typically printed as roman when the 
surrounding text is italic. (For example, academic journals often 
feature a mini-biography of each article's author. When the journal's 
style is to present the mini-biography in italics, any book title 
mentioned therein will usually be in roman.)

To allow this on the Web, the CSS font-style property would need to 
have not just "normal", "italic", and "oblique" values, but also an 
"italic-inverse" value. Browsers should then use this value by default 
for any inline element where they currently use "italic".

> But do they accumulate in principle?  If they do, is the default style 
> sheet correct with respect to the EM element?
> ...

Occasionally I've seen an emphasized word inside an emphasized 
sentence. And stories for young children sometimes have sentences that 
become progressively more emphasized; this is usually indicated by 
increasing the font size.

So a more helpful default would be something like:

     em {font-style: italic-inverse;}
     em em {font-style: bold;}
     em em em {font-size: 1.2em;}

Cheers
-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/