Comment by dkarl
6 years ago
You have to choose one or the other, semantics or formatting. There's a standard way to format a book title: italics. You have to be able to say "format this with italics" or "this is a book title."
A system that prefers semantic tags such as "emphasis" and bans direct formatting such as "italics" only works if you can import or define a semantic tag for "book title" that you know will be formatted correctly. It doesn't make sense to tag a book title with "emphasis," because there are a lot of different ways to express emphasis, and only one of them works (quite coincidentally) for a book title.
Yes but i think we would both agree that in html/markdown it should be "this is book title" because medium allows it. "format this with italics" makes as little sense as "format this with emphasis" they are both wrong. Interestingly "format this with italics" is right solution in print because we encode that meaning in aesthetics and conventions and i guess thats why people think it is also right solution in web. But even in typesetting program that book title will have class .book-title and same italic in footnotes will be .footnote.book-title