cite versus i

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cite versus i thread
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krollans

Hi again,

I’m wondering about how best to mark up <cite> versus <i> in Word documents. I have to specific questions:

  1. If a book title appears in italics in the running text, should this be <cite> or <i>?
  2. How do you mark up the entirety of a citation in a footnote or a bibliography entry? E.g.:

Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 154.

In this example, every word is part of the citation, but some words are in italics. What should be marked up as cite, and what, if anything, should be marked up as italic?

krollans

Sorry, the title of this question should be “italics versus cite”

APLN Moderator

Hi, thank you for your questions!

  1. It is up to your discretion when to use <cite> or <i> for a book title in running text. Either is fine, and using <cite> is not mandatory.
  2. It’s worth noting that <cite> renders the text inside it to appear Italic. Therefore, I would only use <cite> for the book title “Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World” and not the entire citation.
    In an EPUB, using epub:type semantics and any applicable ARIA roles would identify this text as an endnote or footnote. For example, the running text that links to the endnote would have a superscript number with the epub:type=”noteref” and role=”doc-noteref”, where as the endnote citation itself would have the epub:type=”endnote” and a link back to the text that has the role=”doc-backlink”.
    Footnotes are similar but use an <aside> tag with the epub:type=”footnote” and role=”doc-footnote”. The <cite> tag becomes less relevant in this case, and <i> can be used to style the book title.
krollans

Thank you!

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