Thread by @eaton

For language and meaning nerds, the actual ~things~ that live outside the vocabulary and syntax of a sentence but carry important meaning — like emphasis or rhythm — are called "suprasegmentals". In linguistics, "Prosody" is the study of suprasegmentals, and it rocks.

https://twitter.com/cs_ratliff/status/1423082813264367617

This matters a lot in digital content, because the push to make content more flexible and less brittle often means "removing decoration so it can be handled somewhere else." When done naively, though, that can strip away the "suprasegmentals" and discard real meaning.

It's like copying a bunch of formatted text and pasting it into "plain text" — a lot of what vanishes might be purely aesthetic decoration, but things like italicization for emphasis get lost as well, and that conveys actual meaning.

As with text, the answer is to capture the underlying intent, even if the decision about how that meaning is is conveyed (typeface? position? coloration? something else?) gets defered or is left up to another system entirely. That's why HTML moved from the <i> tag to <em>.

And it's why in complex content systems, things like "layout" and "styling" can't be ignored entirely — when used effectively they communicate information, not just aesthetic decoration. Capture the suprasegmentals explicitly, then let the designers interpret them!