Mikko Rantalainen wrote to <mailto:www-html@w3.org> on 14 April 2003 in "Re:
more xhtml 2.0 comments" (<mid:3E9AB528.2040100@st.jyu.fi>):

> if 
> the only thing you can say about a piece of text is that it's usually
> rendered with [italic] text (like some pieces of information in biology)
> then it should be allowed.

Your example doesn't hold. Perhaps XHTML won't provide a mechanism to mark
biological terms, but that doesn't reduce their semantics to a font style.
What is really needed is something like

<taxa><genus>Cicer</genus> <species>arietinum</species></taxa>

Since this is more of a niche requirement than a mainstream requirement, the
approach should not be to include the biology constructs in XHTML 2, but to
enable easy mixing of vocabularies.

-- 
Etan Wexler <mailto:ewexler@stickdog.com>