Re: ASCII convention

In message <434E6FF4.4A00@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
Ruud Harmsen wrote: 

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:51:07 GMT: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

>It was explained to me (to all the readers) years ago when I first
>started coming here. The two things * * and _ _ didn't simply indicate
>"emphasis," which was how I had interpreted them, but bold and italics
>respectively. Of course I never saw / / used for anything but phonemic
>transcriptions.

There you are right, that is my experience too. I learnt about /.../
much later.

There another advantage of CSS again: in HTML, emphasis can be
indicated with <strong>...</strong>, better than directly using
<i>...</i> etc. With external CSS, you can define what strong should
actually look like (italics, bold, colour, larger type, whatever)
elsewhere, but a whole site or parts of it, without altering any HTML.


(a) html is bad because (i) it bloats the size of a message and (ii)
most people clearly don't know how to use it and end up sending messages
that are unreadable because of size, font, and/or color of type.

True but irrelevant, since he's not talking about using HTML in email or news postings, but where it belongs, in web pages. Moreover, the use of HTML plus CSS, because it separates form from content, is the exact antithesis of the kind of badly-structured document you are describing.

(b) Why should I have to bother with all that "defining," html or no?

Come on, surely you know that "you" doesn't always mean you? You *_/personally/_* don't have to. The author of the style *** does the defining; you, the reader, simply choose a style that you like.

--
Richard Herring
.

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