If you read the entire article at the link you posted it recommended using "i" with a class name of "foreignwords" to effectively convey the semantic meaning of why that class is used.
To me that approach is better than nothing but heavily prone to error. It would be much better to have an attribute similar to epub:type or aria:role that has a controlled vocabulary one of which whose terms means "just indicating a foreign word here" officially.
Then you would use an "i" tag but with an extra epub:type attribute set to the universally agreed upon and official term for "foreign word" and let any class attribute be anything you want it to be.
This is the whole idea behind using controlled vocabularies for things like "Add Semantics" as used in the guide/landmarks. In epub 3 there is a much larger controlled vocabulary that can already be used by adding an epub:type attribute to any tag, and the proposed epub3.1 is going to allow full aria:role markup by attribute as well.
Using this approach you do not need both "i" and "em" or both "b" and "strong". The tag itself provides the fall back styling, and class defines the active styling, and the epub:type or aria attribute defines the semantic meaning possibly independent of tag with a controlled vocabulary instead of free-form langauge dependent interpretation.
KevinH
Quote:
Originally Posted by bookman156
I don't quite understand what you mean. In itself a class name would mean nothing, but what it meant would be defined in the stylesheet and so recognised there.
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