WordPress.org

1. hughbiquitous
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   If you use a foreign-language term (e.g., when you want to say "for example," you're technically supposed to write e.g. in italics because it's Latin - exempli gratia), what should your markup be?

   Should you use:

   <i lang="latin">e.g.</i>

   ... or ...

   <span style="font-style: italic" lang="latin">e.g.</span>

   ... or something else?

   Even here, typing this into the textbox, the only tag that is available to me is <em>, but that's semantically misleading - it's not emphasis... I'm not sure what it is, though...

2. delFUEGO
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   I think you should use the tag "Acronym" using the "lang" and "xml:lang" attributes in this case:

   <acronym title="exempli gratia" lang="li" xml:lang="li" >e.g.</acronym>

   PS: "li" = Latin

3. hughbiquitous
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   Thanks for the tip on the proper lang attribute for Latin. I confess I didn't look that up...

   But what about the case where I have a word that's not an acronym? Really, now that I think about it, it goes beyond just foreign language words...

   How should one semantically mark up things like:

   "Capt. James T. Kirk of the Enterprise resorted to ad hominem attacks against his enemies."

   "Enterprise" is the name of a vessel.
   "Ad hominem" is Latin.

   Wikipedia has some remarks worth noting...

4. notthatugly
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   Personally, I always use <i> for non-English phrases, because as you say <em> is unsemantic. Italicising foreign words is just a typographical convention, so gets a purely presentational tag. For titles I use <cite>, which may not be a perfect solution but is the best I have been able to find.

Topic Closed

This topic has been closed to new replies.