> I think this is perhaps a bit extreme, and in practice most people would
> prefer some preservation of italic emphasis etc. (an empirical question)
I agree. My only point is that the markup format which preserves such
italic emphasis should not be HTML, it should be something else, perhaps
Adobe Acrobat (or whatever they've renamed it to).
> Perhaps we ought to use <EMPH> for all inline emphasis! This gets around
> the problem in dealing with every growing categories for different needs.
> You then would see elements like:
> <EMPH tag="author">H. G. Wells</EMPH>
> The Web could then have an evolving set of well known categories.
> Unrecognised categories would simply be ignored by the browser. Users
> would also be able to change how the browser renders each category.
I think I see a smiley here, but it's not such a silly idea. I've been
working on something similar, a procedural markup scheme in which the
reason for the markup occurs along with the markup.
Bill