Re: Literary titles & formatting

At 4:38 PM -0500 1/24/02, Liz Roberts wrote:
>Glad to see the traffic increase so dramatically!
>
>Quick question: when indicating a book title, is <em> or <i> better?

I tend to use <cite> with appropriate styles if necessary.

Because there is not a <booktitle> element, you have to use the
element that is closest in meaning _and_ which does not mean
something else.

In this case, <em> means something else -- emphasis -- so between
<i> and <em>, <i> is preferred because it is meaning-neutral.  It
is pure presentation and contains no semantic information.  This is
as appropriate as using <span class="booktitle"> around the title,
and setting the style using CSS, but the CSS approach is probably
better as <i> has been abused in the past.

So I would rank those in order from "best" to "worst":

      <cite>
      <span class="booktitle"> plus CSS rules
      <i>
      <em>

--Kynn

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