Italics get used to express important semantic meaning, so unicode should support them

[Doug Ewell]

Christian Kleineidam wrote:

> "Evidence suggesting that 𝐻𝑜𝑚𝑜 𝑛𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑠 contributed the H2
> 𝑀𝐴𝑃𝑇 haplotype to 𝐻𝑜𝑚𝑜 𝑠𝑎𝑝𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑠"

"Evidence suggesting that Homo neanderthalensis contributed the H2 MAPT haplotype to Homo sapiens"

This title is completely meaningful in plain text. The convention to style the names of species and haplotypes in italics is just that, a styling convention.

> Between RTF, Markdown, SGML, HTML, XML and Wikitext there are multiple
> different formats we could use on Wikidata to potentially represent
> italics. If we would however choose any one of them that would make it
> harder for data-reusers who use another format to interact with our
> data as they would need to run a parser over the data which increases
> their code complexity and makes it harder to interact with our data.

https://xkcd.com/927/

> The inability to follow the recommendations of the Chicago Manual of
> Style to express semantic meaning in italics means that unicode fails
> in it's mission to be able to express all semantic distinctions. This
> means that it's technically impossible to follow the Chicago Manual of
> Style in code comments of programming code that are in unicode.

Style guides such as Chicago and AP and MLA cover many stylistic realms beyond this. They tell the writer how to indent certain passages and what sort of contrastive font faces and sizes should be used for quotations and how tables should be laid out. None of this is within the scope of a plain-text encoding standard either.

--
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org