11-04-2011, 02:04 AM
britlion Wrote:nitrofurano Wrote:btw, would be great if the 'italic' command could be renamed to 'oblique' or 'slant' - naming 'oblique' as 'italic' is a similar mistake as naming 'ellipse' as 'oval', when they are completelly different things (a mistake sadly used on Nodebox ( <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://nodebox.net">http://nodebox.net</a><!-- m --> ), and fixed on Shoebot fork ( <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://shoebot.net">http://shoebot.net</a><!-- m --> ) ) - maybe 'oblique', for example, being used by default, and deprecating 'italic' (for that people still using that), would be the best idea?
You're absolutely right - it's not technically another font, it's an oblique version of the current one. However, as wikipedia points out "In many computing interfaces, the text leaning effect is called Italic, whether or not an italic font is used to render the text." - there's a certain convention to doing this. I'd much rather it was called italic that people would understand and use, rather than oblique, which people might miss. Even if it's technically incorrect.
We can put a note on the web page for the command though
the problem, or danger, of naming oblique as italic is just like "telling a lie often to become a true", just like the indian castes, or people saying bullfight is tradition or culture, or even saying hackers are the same as crackers (like most of the "journalists" shamefully does, ignoring completelly about MIT hacker ethics), etc.. - in my oppinion, the only way to correcting this kind of mistake, specially when sadly it is becoming a convention, is doing our part on avoiding it, even when we are doing this alone