Re: rethinking @def*

[Gavin Smith]

On Mon, Aug 01, 2022 at 12:56:23AM +0200, pertusus@free.fr wrote:
> > What was the benefit of changing <em class="emph"> to
> > <span class="r"><i class="slanted">?  Isn't the former much simpler?
> 
> It is not the same, <span class="r"> isolates from the surrounding
> fonts, using <span class="r"><i class="slanted"> amounts to really doing
> the same as in LaTeX (and, I believe, TeX).

I thought we still wanted a fairly simple HTML output without
specifying exact details of formatting.  Simpler output would make
it easier for users to customize the manual with CSS, as well as any
other processing they wanted to do.

When would a @def* block be inheriting font styles that we would need to
cancel?

The 'emph' class on <em class="emph"> wasn't necessary as
it wasn't coming from the @emph command (in the document,
at least).  But I think a special class is useful.  I saw
you added the "def-meta-var-arguments" class in a recent
commit.

It seems like there are three choices for the tag, <em>, <i> and
<var>.  Previously, we used <em>.  I don't have a strong opinion
which one is best.

In the TeX output, we use slanted roman for the definition line
and @var, not italics.

When I checked in a web browser (Chromium), <i> and others appeared to
be slanted roman, not italics.  I couldn't get italics whatever I did
(with a closed "a" and a tail on the "f").  (It probably depends on
my default system fonts and likely other users would get true italics.)

I think it would be fine to use <em> or <var> and not worry if the browser
does use a true italic for these in HTML output.