Last modified: 2013-08-06 00:36:52 UTC
MediaWiki interprets '' as <em>. But most pages created with MediaWiki are for Wikimedia projects, which aren't like most other Web sites; most of our uses of italics are for citations of works <cite>, phrases in other languages <i lang="de">, taxonomical names <i class="taxonomy">, or mathematical variables <var>. Very, very few are for emphasized text. Since Wikimedia project contributors are unlikely to care about the distinction between <em>/<cite>/ <var>/<dfn>/etc, articles would sound more sensible to screenreaders if '' was interpreted as the neutral <i>. (Possibly new syntax for emphasis, citations, and variables could be created later for those thoughtful enough to use it.)
Can you give an example of a screen reader which reads <em> and <i> differently, and describe what the difference is?
... No. According to e-mail from Joe Clark (who should know, if anyone does), currently most screenreaders piggyback on MSIE, which does not distinguish between <i>/ <em>/<cite>/etc. Disillusioned I am, yes. So while we wait for more advanced screenreaders to arrive, I guess the main current problem is with people who use user styles [[Help:User_style]] to distinguish the various semantic elements. For example, em {font-color: #090} cite {font-weight: 550}. But I can understand if you have better things to do than a find-and-replace for their benefit.
I'd rather see a solution that adds CITE, DFN, VAR, etc. to wikitext, than to emasculate the EMs. Adoption would take a while, but in time we'd have a semantically richer site. The search engine could be enhanced to take advantage of these. Might be useful to add some common shortcuts specific to particular disciplines, which render HTML like the following: <i class="specific">Roadrunnerus fastus<> <i class="foreign" lang="la">e pluribus unum<> <cite class="novel">Crime and Punishment<>
<cite> and <var> are permitted HTML tags in wikitext, so if you _must_ use them you can use them directly. <dfn> is not currently available, but the self-link->bold special case could/should perhaps output <dfn> instead of <strong>. One issue is that these tags don't have a standard formatting, so the stylesheets may need to be careful about undoing 'weird' defaults in some browsers.
Finally got around to this. Changed in 1.4 CVS.
Thanks, Brion!
