Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
By italics I presume you mean emphasis of one or more words within a paragraph (character type styles rather than paragraph type styles). Yes such emphasis is generally represented by italicised text in novels but I make the distinction because it is generally better that a style is named for the purpose (which presumably will not change), rather than the formatting used, which could change.
The distinction can be important. For example I may have emphasis in the dialogue in the main text, but I may also have - for example - a bibliography at the end that uses variously formatted text. If my emphasis style is named "italics" and today I choose to format parts of my bibliography as italics, then I may make the mistake of using the "italics" style. And now, suddenly and presumably accidentally, I have tied the formatting of my bibliography to the formatting of my main text. If I want to change one without changing the other I would have to go back and change the styles of all the relevant words. I can avoid such accidents by naming my styles by purpose. A style of "Emphasis" means I one thing, "BiblioBookTitle" means something else.
And yes, the result is that your html looks like:
Main text: I will <span class="Emphasis">not</span> do that.
Bibliography: Smith, A, B. <span class="BiblioBookTitle">Words of Wisdom</span>, pages 325-329.
This is normal and expected. Both styles exist within your CSS and can be adjusted if needed - and because they are clearly named you know specifically what you are changing. Obviously "<span class="Emphasis">" is much longer and uglier than "<i>", but the reader is never supposed to see the raw HTML. Yes, HTML and XML can be horribly verbose languages and do increase the file size significantly, but this is also normal and expected. (And anyway, we only use emphasis carefully and deliberately - don't we?  - so there is not going to be that many of them.)
PS. Thanks for the apple.  |
Thanks for the explanation about the use of italics and controlling the naming of the styles. So like for instance though, when I manipulate the paragraphing by modifying the style, I undo the manipulation before turning the .doc to a .html. But when I have an italic (or emphasis) style, I leave that style in there, right? Then it gets picked up properly as an italic because of the CSS of the .doc (the CSS that partially is created when creating the italics/emphasis style.)
And I gotta tell you I came across a ten-year-old .doc novel and (remember how I said earlier that I wrote so simply and didn't really need to use styles?) and oh my gosh! I looked at the styles and there were TONS of them. Just a mess.
And I experimented today and just hit a single tab to see what would happen. In the html there were like ten non-breaking spaces. A mini-mess.
So yes, I am a believer. I WILL write with styles from now on. Thanks again!
P.S. Please don't ever leave MR (in case I have questions).
P.S.S. 1000 views on this thread. I'm sure I'm not the only one you're helping!