is Robert O'Rourke, a front-end web developer from Liverpool
One thing I never knew when I started web design was that italics were not simply a way to emphasise text. The correlation of the HTML <em> tag with the default style being italic text was a design choice made in context of the rest of the default styles. It could easily have been that normal paragraph text was italic and for emphasis it was made regular.
I’m no expert – yet – but quite a lot of posts on the web about typography are related to CSS techniques and currently font-embedding. Very few tell us about the best practices for setting specific elements of the text we are working with. To paraphrase Robert Bringhurst typography should reflect the natural language as it is spoken
. There are some acronyms that we pronounce as a word like Nato or laser and they should therefore be written as words. For acronyms in which we pronounce the letters such as CD or DNA they should be written as capital letters. That’s all well and good however from Erik Spiekerman‘s typographic tips over on the FontFeed blog:
NEVER use CAPITAL letters to accentuate words in running copy. They STICK OUT far too much spoiling the LOOK of the column or page. Use italics instead. If you have to set words in capitals, use proper small caps with or without initial capitals.
For acronyms where each letter is pronounced – the letters are still capitalised. As Erik states this is where small caps come into play. They allow you to have capital letters with the same x-height as your regular letter text, thus not sticking out and ruining your lovely paragraph.
This tidbit of CSS is a must in all of my style sheets from now on:
abbr { font-variant: small-caps; text-transform: lowercase; }