<i>, <em> or <span> for italics ?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

They spelled it wrong

It would only be incorrectly spelled if it was centre.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It would only be incorrectly spelled if it was centre.

Midpoint.

[JSWolf]

Due to this thread, I have found a good use for <em>. But I have not found a good use for <em> if all it's going to do is show italicized text.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But I have not found a good use for <em> if all it's going to do is show italicized text.

Hence HTML5 correctly bringing back <i>.

[JSWolf]

Why is it that some eBooks use <em> instead of <i> and <strong> instead of <b> when There is no need for <em> and/or <strong>?

[Turtle91]

There WAS a need when they deprecated <i>/<b>. It is/was more semantically correct because <i>/<b> are just visual...it's understandable that you don't see a need when you aren't working with audio readers or other accessibility issues.

I just learned that chapter/scene breaks are supposed to be done using an <hr/> because audio readers/accessibility devices can't tell the difference between sections if you just use a <div> or <p>. Soooo.... I went in and figured out how to do it properly - even though I don't need or use accessibility devices (yet). Do my books look OK without using the <hr/>, of course - they look great - but it is more correct to use the <hr/> so I do. Likewise, it is more correct to use the <em>/<strong> so I do.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

There WAS a need when they deprecated <i>/<b>. It is/was more semantically correct because <i>/<b> are just visual...it's understandable that you don't see a need when you aren't working with audio readers or other accessibility issues.

I just learned that chapter/scene breaks are supposed to be done using an <hr/> because audio readers/accessibility devices can't tell the difference between sections if you just use a <div> or <p>. Soooo.... I went in and figured out how to do it properly - even though I don't need or use accessibility devices (yet). Do my books look OK without using the <hr/>, of course - they look great - but it is more correct to use the <hr/> so I do. Likewise, it is more correct to use the <em>/<strong> so I do.

Hmmmm....the hr? blick.

Hitch

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Hmmmm....the hr? blick.

Hitch

Yeah, that was a new one to me too. I haven't really paid attention to accessibility issues...I haven't needed them...and, visually, my books looked fine. But, life happens. Sometimes things become more important than they used to be. Sooo, I'm trying to do better.

Here's where I learned about the hr tag as a context break.

I don't really approve of their use of <p></p> blank lines on either side of the <hr/>...that's what CSS margin's are for...

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Yeah, that was a new one to me too. I haven't really paid attention to accessibility issues...I haven't needed them...and, visually, my books looked fine. But, life happens. Sometimes things become more important than they used to be. Sooo, I'm trying to do better.

Here's where I learned about the hr tag as a context break.

I don't really approve of their use of <p></p> blank lines on either side of the <hr/>...that's what CSS margin's are for...

Scroll down on that page; they disagree. (About CSS/margins, etc. FWIW, I agree with you.) And why on earth does one empty paragraph somehow "signal" that something's going to change? Have they LOOKED at the average, typical, DIY from-Word self-published book?

My question is, if you can use pictures of an asterism, for crying out loud, (example 2) why not the real thing, or a fleuron? How is an image of asterisks somehow friendlier, accessibility-wise, than a fleuron or 3 asterisks themselves?

It says that it's "suboptimal," but only because they want uniformity. You can use the alt tag, which we do, for images, to indicate scene-breaks and the like. That's not sub-optimal. I disagree with their take (and have for a while on this). An HR is hardly guaranteed to say to someone "oh, hey, here's a scene-break" when they're used in non-fiction/how-tos for other things.

It's as if nobody thought about this, the hr/ outside of fiction!!!

Hitch

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Yeah, that was a new one to me too. I haven't really paid attention to accessibility issues...I haven't needed them...and, visually, my books looked fine. But, life happens. Sometimes things become more important than they used to be. Sooo, I'm trying to do better.

Here's where I learned about the hr tag as a context break.

I don't really approve of their use of <p></p> blank lines on either side of the <hr/>...that's what CSS margin's are for...

I like to make my hrs be sort of subtle, not full width and not fully black, and as you say, the spacing is in the hr and I add some to the p that follows it:

hr {
    background-color: hsl(0, 0%, 35%);
    border-style: none;
    height: 1px;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
    margin-top: 1em;
    width: 6em;
    page-break-after: avoid;
    break-after: avoid;
    width: 6em;
}

hr + p  {
    margin-top: 1.0em;
    text-indent: 0em;
}

I don't remember where but I saw an article recently about some things you could do to jazz up the hr to make it less boring than the single rule.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

I just learned that chapter/scene breaks are supposed to be done using an <hr/> [...]

Originally Posted by Hitch

My question is, if you can use pictures of an asterism, for crying out loud, (example 2) why not the real thing, or a fleuron? How is an image of asterisks somehow friendlier, accessibility-wise, than a fleuron or 3 asterisks themselves?

Agreed. Still hold same views we held back in 2019, "Why is it so hard to preserve blank lines?".

The <hr/> as scenebreak seems a little odd in ebooks.

For web, maybe, since you can more reliably use more complex CSS3 to substitute/override the look.

But in ebooks? Just KISS. Simple asterisks, simple fleuron.

For EPUB3 Fiction specifically, I wonder if you could also just split each scene into individual <section>s as an alternative... (and leave the simple asterisks/image in there, of course! )

Side Note on <hr>: Usually when I scratch my head on some stuff, I head over to HTML5Doctor and see what they say: "The small & hr elements":

[...] I learned <hr> actually means end of one section, start of another, which is the same semantically as </section><section>. Because elements like <section> already indicate this intrinsically, <hr> is more for thematic breaks, such as separating different topics within a section of prose, or between scenes in a novel. However you can use it anywhere you can use a <p>.

Hmmmm... definitely would require more thought + reading into the details/reasoning...

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Just ran across this one a few weeks ago: "dotted b" and "dotted d". Only used in Irish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography

Initially found out about it in a bug in Source Code Pro:

https://github.com/adobe-fonts/sourc...pro/issues/205

And "dotless i" and "dotted capital I" in Turkish... oh boy, does that one open up a huge can of worms. It's the source of many bugs in programs (capitalization, comparing strings, sorting, etc.):

https://haacked.com/archive/2012/07/...uld-care.aspx/

And how do you spell an Irish person's name or pronounce it? Whatever way they say.
Some old road signs have the dotted h, instead of th, like Bother for road.
Actually b c d g m p s and t all took a dot.
bh, ch, dh, fh, gh, mh, ph, sh, th
The s without a dot was so rare that actually most Irish words, especially starting with an S are pronouced sh.
Síle = Sheelagh or Sheila.
Actually Hebrew has almost the same constants in hard and soft versions, but for kids books and the Bible they use the dot in the opposite sense.
I was puzzled how the name Madb might be pronounced. It went out of fashion unlike Donal which is just as old. My Irish speaking connections didn't know and were unsure about Neamhain as it's also now unused for the same reason. Turns out the dots are missing on Madb, so it's Madhbh. Which is a little easier. The dh is now often silent, or a soft y sound. The bh is a soft b which can be like an English or German w. See Lenition. Meábh is thus the most similar modern Irish name, though eá is longer vowel sound than adh (~ay).

I proof a LOT of contemporaneously set books with Irish names in them. Today in the real world people in Ireland might use ancient Irish spelling, pre-1948 spelling, modern Irish spelling, English transliteration. Pronuciation varies dramatically with region. Alice and Eilis can be pronouced the same.

I'd like to be able sometimes to use traditional Irish Orthography, but it seems to have zero support on mobi, and tricky on Linux (which is better than Windows) and hard on azw/KF8 or epub. Choosing a suitable font isn't simple. Many are poor. I tried the Turkish undotted i for the proper Irish i and it was a bad idea. The problem too is mixing fonts in the same line as they rarely have the same size for the same em/pt size. I've had difficulty with a Sans to match the size of Georgia, so it's not just language orthography.

The oldest Proto-Celtic known was associated with the European Celtic Helveti (one tribe of Swiss founders, clue in name), which uses a mix of Greek and Etruscan letters, about 700 BC. At one stage the Greeks had no H letter so put a ' at the beginning of words starting with H. Also Irish doesn't use the apostrophe, a word often takes an h after the first letter in the genitive case.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Quoth

And how do you spell an Irish person's name or pronounce it? Whatever way they say.
Some old road signs have the dotted h, instead of th, like Bother for road.
Actually b c d g m p s and t all took a dot.
bh, ch, dh, fh, gh, mh, ph, sh, th
The s without a dot was so rare that actually most Irish words, especially starting with an S are pronouced sh.
Síle = Sheelagh or Sheila.
(snippage)

See Lenition. Meábh is thus the most similar modern Irish name, though eá is longer vowel sound than adh (~ay).

I proof a LOT of contemporaneously set books with Irish names in them. Today in the real world people in Ireland might use ancient Irish spelling, pre-1948 spelling, modern Irish spelling, English transliteration. Pronuciation varies dramatically with region. Alice and Eilis can be pronouced the same.

I'd like to be able sometimes to use traditional Irish Orthography, but it seems to have zero support on mobi, and tricky on Linux (which is better than Windows) and hard on azw/KF8 or epub. Choosing a suitable font isn't simple. Many are poor. I tried the Turkish undotted i for the proper Irish i and it was a bad idea. The problem too is mixing fonts in the same line as they rarely have the same size for the same em/pt size. I've had difficulty with a Sans to match the size of Georgia, so it's not just language orthography.

The oldest Proto-Celtic known was associated with the European Celtic Helveti (one tribe of Swiss founders, clue in name), which uses a mix of Greek and Etruscan letters, about 700 BC. At one stage the Greeks had no H letter so put a ' at the beginning of words starting with H. Also Irish doesn't use the apostrophe, a word often takes an h after the first letter in the genitive case.

Leeetle non-sequitur here:

Local weatherman here, started about..hell, 25-30 years ago. His name is Sean McLaughlin, right? For those of you paying attention, most of us would pronounce that SHAWWWN, right?

No! His mother saw the name, "Sean." She named him "Sean." But she'd never heard it pronounced, so, it's pronounced "Seen."

But wait, there's more!

His brother? Is named Shawn. Prounced, of course, Shawn.

[SMH] (A kinda, almost Irish story, just...not from Ireland. Ha!)


Hitch

[najgori]

Shout-out to Shaun William Ryder of Happy Mondays

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Leeetle non-sequitur here:

Local weatherman here, started about..hell, 25-30 years ago. His name is Sean McLaughlin, right? For those of you paying attention, most of us would pronounce that SHAWWWN, right?

No! His mother saw the name, "Sean." She named him "Sean." But she'd never heard it pronounced, so, it's pronounced "Seen."

But wait, there's more!

His brother? Is named Shawn. Prounced, of course, Shawn.

[SMH] (A kinda, almost Irish story, just...not from Ireland. Ha!)


Hitch

There was a guy playing baseball, catcher, for a local college. His first name is Ian. I would would have thought it'd be pronounced the usual way, EE-an. Nope, apparently his parents pronounce it EYE-an because that's how he was always announced when he came up to bat.