Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 02/01/06 22:20

Leonard Blaisdell <leo@greatbasin.com> wrote:

> I'll wait for anyone here to give a rational explanation of why the
> names of bacteria should be italicized other than by convention.

The convention is sufficient here. It is a long-standing convention in
biology. Since you know you want the name to appear in italics if
possible at all, there is no reason to mess around with markup other
than <i>, since any other element that _might_ be rendered in italics
would be in italics by coincidence only, whereas <i> means italics
_by definition_.

> Perhaps a further iteration of HTML will give us a linnaean
> element.

Hardly. It seems that there will be no further iteration - just
stagnation or replacement, sadly enough. But if there were an element
for scientific names of species, it would need to be rather more
detailed. For example, in the _full_ scientific name "Pseudomonas
fluorescens Migula 1895", only the first two words shall appear in
italics. Thus, either the element should have some inner markup, or a
user agent would have know how to process its content, instead of
blindly rendering all of it in italics.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

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