Comments on: SimpleQuiz › Part XIII › Empholdics › Conclusion

By: Dave Calam

Dave Calam — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 17:42:33 +0000

And the next SimpleQuiz—designed to really piss of the typological purists: What is the correct mark-up for letterspacing blackletter text?

By: Stacy

Stacy — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 22:07:33 +0000

Is there a reason why SimplePost is no longer up anymore? Is there any place I can get this?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 05:24:15 +0000

I’m excited for it… I can’t believe I made a grammar error in a 19 word comment… and I forgot to end my A href

By: Dan Cederholm

Dan Cederholm — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 22:50:21 +0000

Not to worry, Andrew — you will be sick of hearing about the book very soon ;-)

By: Richard Rutter

Richard Rutter — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 19:50:25 +0000

Jina:
> I’m curious: is there a browser that does not display em as italicized and strong as bold?
AvantGo on older hand devices such as Palm Vx can’t display italic text. Both em and strong are rendered bold.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 07:29:18 +0000

Dan, why haven't I hear about You book? Maybe I'm just not a long time reader (only 3 months)

By: darrel

darrel — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 17:30:55 +0000

Andrei – it certainly wasn’t asked just for academic reasons. What is so out of the ordinary about text that is both bold and italic? These are pretty basic styles.
It’s bad typopgraphy/writing style. There’s really no reason to make a sigle item (a world, a passage, etc.) BOTH italics and bold. From a visual design standpoint, you pick one or the other.
If you are finding yourself using both, take a step back and ask yourself why.
A perfectly legitimate use of bolded italics would be to represent emphasis in an extended passage of italic (or bold) text
I agree. So, in this situation, wouldn’t:
{cite}This is the sample passage where I want to {em}bold{/em} a single word{/cite}
…make the most sense? Style the tags to your hearts content. (BTW, a suitable alternative would be to NOT italicize the item you need to emphasize, but I digress…)

By: Ben Scofield

Ben Scofield — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 02:49:36 +0000

Yes, I’ve seen that convention – I’ve never particularly liked it, though :)
But we’re still left with the problem of emphasizing a part of a bold passage.

By: Micah

Micah — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 02:26:58 +0000

I think the standard way of emphasizing a word in italicized text is to reverse the italicization, ie to make it non-italicized. This is easy to do with css if, for example, I want to italicize this word.

I want to italicize this word.

em { font-style: italic; } em em { font-style: normal; }

And again, let me plug eschewing CLASSes in favor of nested tags. Class names, by not being defined in the DTD, are semantically meaningless to a computer, regardless of how they are named. As an extreme example, I would propose dropping class="thisisreallyimportant" in favor of:

foobar

By: Ben Scofield

Ben Scofield — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 23:04:24 +0000

Andrei,
The Bringhurst passage you quoted in your comment on the original thread doesn’t forbid the use of bolded italic text; it merely requires that you not drop bolded italic text into the middle of a normal weight roman passage. To quote: “3.5.1 Change one parameter at a time.”
A perfectly legitimate use of bolded italics would be to represent emphasis in an extended passage of italic (or bold) text, in which case you would be following Bringhurst’s dictum.