DOCBOOK: Marking Up Taxonomic Names

[Mike Taylor <mike@seatbooker.net>]

Dear DocBook Gurus (or at least, more experienced users than me!)

I want to refer to taxonomic names -- genus, species, etc. -- in my
DocBook documents.  By convention, these are _always_ set in italics,
and if mine are not, then I will just look ignorant.  What should I
use?

The closest thing I could find to a "correct" answer was something
like

	<phrase role="genus">Sauroposeidon</phrase>
	<phrase role="species">proteles</phrase>

but that doesn't get any typographical treatment, so it's useless to
me.  (The default HTML conversion of this just gives me <SPAN
class="phrase">, discarding the genus/species information, so I can't
use CSS to get the typography I need.)

Then I wondered about <foreignphrase>, but first that's not really
quite accurate, and second, the Processing Expectations section in the
book just says "ForeignPrases are _often_ given special typographical
treatment, such as italics" (emphasis added) which isn't good enough.

I can't even cheat by falling back to an <italic> markup -- there's no
such thing, and I fully understand the reasons why -- and <emphasize>
hedges over its typographical representation for presumably the same
reasons.

What's a poor boy to do?

 _/|_	 _______________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor   <mike@miketaylor.org.uk>   www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  Ich spreche nicht Deutsch, ausgenommen diesen Satz.