> I have two thoughts:
>
> 1) Can you wait for style sheets?
Sure, if anyone can guarantee me that they *will* happen.
> 2) In the mean-time, could you use <code>...</code> which would at least
> give you a different font than the normal one. I guess that's the main
> thing: does it _have_ to be sans serif? or is the goal simply to
> distinguish it from the other text?
It doesn't *have* to be sans-serif. It's just a convention. I don't
like the idea of overloading the <code> directive. This is ungood.
Using <render> to create a new tag is probably a better idea. One of
the reasons for tagging meta-text is that sometimes the user might want
to render only the definitions, but not the annotations, if he is
working in a small window or only wants an "abridged" version of the
information.
I agree completely that "physical" mark-up is the worst case scenario.
In fact, I expect that automated software (such as spelling and syntax
checkers, translators, etc) will probably use my dictionary more than
humans, so the semantic tagging is more important than the physical
mark-up.
For instance, you want to clearly tag a usage of a word as "deprecated"
or "out of date" so that your Russian to English business letter
translating software doesn't sound like it was written by Charles Dickens.
-Philip