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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

I agree completely—but I'll go further. From a UI standpoint, italics should be treated akin to capital/lowercase letters.

Currently, on every computer I'm aware of, if I copy an all-caps paragraph and paste into the middle of an all-lowercase paragraph, the pasted text will still be capitalized. Similarly, if I click into an all-caps paragraph and start typing without caps-lock on, the new text will be lowercase.

Italics should work the same way.

Note: I am aware that capitals, unlike italics, are different characters in Unicode/ASCII. Put that aside for a moment, it's not relevant to UI behavior, users don't care.

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In CSS, `text-transform: uppercase;` is able to separate case from styling. I've used it frequently in the past, since you often want to experiment with all-caps for short headings, captions, subtitles, etc. Whereas if you hard-code the all-caps in text, you can't go back.

In Chrome, if you copy CSS-all-caps text to the clipboard, it is copied as uppercase.

Intriguingly, in Firefox, it is copied as the original (mixed case) source HTML text.

I do like the idea treating all-caps as a style, just like small caps. The problem, of course, is that it makes it kind of impossible to type within it, since there's no feedback as to when you're typing capital letters at the starts of sentences or not.

To be clear, my assertion is that most user-facing text editors should have the opposite of all-caps as a style! I think italics should be treated the way we treat capitalization.

Pressing ⌘I (or using the UI equivalent) should act like the italics version of caps lock.

I much prefer the approach of applying emphasis, be it italics, bold, all-caps etc, on top of plain text. To me this is the most versatile approach and I think is better for accessibility.

A sentence with italics or any other emphasis should read exactly the same without that emphasis. Where the same isn't true of capitalisation.

> A sentence with italics or any other emphasis should read exactly the same without that emphasis.

Not true. In conventional English, it is typical (if not expected) to add verbal emphasis to italicized words while reading aloud.

> A sentence with italics or any other emphasis should read exactly the same without that emphasis.

But it doesn't, that's the thing! The word you italicize can alter the meaning of a sentence. For instance:

> "I didn't steal Sally's necklace!"

> "I didn't steal Sally's necklace!"

> "I didn't steal Sally's necklace!"

As of this writing my parent comment is downvoted, so maybe the difference between the three sentences is less obvious than I thought. While all three sentences assert that I didn't steal Sally's necklace:

• The first version implies that I acquired Sally's necklace via other means.

• The second version implies that I stole someone else's necklace.

• The last version implies that I stole something else from Sally.

One of my favorites:

I didn’t say I took the money.

I didn’t say I took the money.

I didn’t say I took the money.

I didn’t say I took the money.

I didn’t say I took the money.

I didn’t say I took the money.

What makes italics so special it deserves that treatment and not everything else in rich-text (bold, underline, sub/superscript)?

The fact that it is special? All of this is arbitrary, that doesn't make it wrong.

Italics is the most important of those styling options for formal English writing (eg MLA style). Underlining was traditionally used a as substitute if italics were unavailable.

Subscripts and superscripts should probably work the same way as italics. They're just not as top of mind for me because I don't use them as often in my day-to-day life (and when I do, I often use the unicode characters).

I could see an argument for treating bold and underline this way as well, but I think the case is less clear-cut. Boldness is more likely than italics to be used for visual styling as opposed to semantic meaning.

Yup, bold is mostly used stylistically for headings, titles, stuff like that. (And sometimes as part of link styling, especially with a lighter link color.)

Virtually the only time it's used within text is in a textbook-type situation, where the first use of key terms is in bold, but subsequent usage isn't. Which isn't helpful/relevant if you're copying a passage from it -- just because it was the first usage in that book, doesn't mean it's the first usage in your own document.

And underlining doesn't really exist typographically except for links. It's always been the handwriting/typewriter substitute for italics. It has no established meaning whatsoever -- any non-link usage of it is idiosyncratic, which is usually not something you'd want to preserve.

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