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The joke is that italic can also mean Italic, the ethnolonguistic group of those who spoke Italic languages and why Italy is named so. The phrase "What has sem
by cercatrova 4y ago
The joke is that italic can also mean Italic, the ethnolonguistic group of those who spoke Italic languages and why Italy is named so.
The phrase "What has semantic HTML ever done for us?" is a riff on the quote "What have the Romans ever done for us?" from the movie Life of Brian, about a Jewish-Roman man mistaken for another Messiah.
The Romans are, of course, Italic peoples.
- kazinator 4y agoNo, that's not the joke, though for a brief split second, some moments after I wrote the comment, it occurred to me that the interpretation might arise. Italic type is derived from a form of semi-cursive writing, and is entrenched in the European printing tradition. No punning with Italy intended. So what does it mean if you have <i> around Chinese, or Devangari or what have you? Do you just apply shear to make the text slanted? I suspect that it bothered some "woke" types that HTML contains Euro-centric typographical directives, so they have been repurposed to have some sort of, culturally neutral semantics that is more inclusive of the planet's diversity (pardon me if I'm not nailing the terminology here). In short, <i> no longer belongs to whitey and his writing system.
- reaperducer 4y agoSo what does it mean if you have <i> around Chinese There's actually a tag for this. I can't remember what it is, but it puts dots above the ideograms, which serves the same function.
- maxwelljoslyn 4y agoSpeaking only of HTML tags, you might be thinking of (the HTML version of) "ruby" characters, which isn't dots, but does allow for annotatation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character#HTML_markup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character#HTML_markup With CSS `text-emphasis` we can do the dots you are speaking of: https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/t/text-emphasis/ https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/t/text-emphasis/ Probably there are other useful bits of HTML/CSS for Asian languages. (right to left and/or vertical writing, anyone? I always wanted to fart around with pretty-printed Chinese poems and, like, calligraphy script fonts with procedurally generated jitter.) Edit: there are also Unicode entities for these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emphasis_mark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emphasis_mark
- recuter 4y ago
- apricot 4y agoJust saying slanted is not problematic. 眼 would be.
- csande17 4y ago> So what does it mean if you have <i> around Chinese, or Devangari or what have you? Do you just apply shear to make the text slanted? Actually, yes! <i> is still defined in the standard to use the italic font style: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#phrasing-content-3 https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#phrasing-content-3 And if there isn't an italic version of the font (often the case for Chinese etc), https://w3c.github.io/csswg-drafts/css-fonts/#font-style-prop https://w3c.github.io/csswg-drafts/css-fonts/#font-style-pro... says the browser should programatically shear it: > If no italic or oblique face is available, oblique faces may be synthesized by rendering non-obliqued faces with an artificial obliquing operation.
- rawrawrawrr 4y agoI thought cercatrova's interpretation was a lot funnier.
- jmopp 4y agoWhile Italic type is a European thing, it is a very useful thing that does have some parallels in other scripts (Consider Rashi script for Hebrew, or how Japanese uses Katakana in a similar way). No need to get all 'anti-woke' about it: if it were the case that people had a problem with 'Italic type', the phrase 'oblique type' is right there for use.
- kazinator 4y agoCan the semantics of <i> stretch so far as to turn hiragana into katakana?