On Fri, 24 Mar 2006, David Woolley wrote:

> The human usability of DFN was established long before the web was ever
> invented.  It was conventional, in typography, to use italics for the
> defining use of word or phrase.  DFN is a more precise way of encoding
> the same semantics.

How is the reader expected to know whether italics is used in printed 
matter to indicate a defining occurrence, or to emphasize, or to indicate 
a foreign word, or because it is a variable, or due to a special 
convention like italicizing symbols of quantities in physics, or just for 
esthetics? Similar considerations apply to web pages using markup like 
<dfn>, <i>, <cite>, etc.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/