Encoding of simple renditional highlighting using hi
The WWP uses hi to encode letters or words which are renditionally distinct for reasons which are either decorative or apparently accidental, rather than linguistically motivated. The most frequent examples of this usage are wrong-font letters (individual characters in a different font within a word), or for words highlighted at the beginning of each paragraph as a decorative feature; parts of words which are highlighted solely because of a line break (as on title pages, where a word may span a line break and the two lines may be in different fonts); and individual words on a title page which are highlighted for decorative or display reasons.
The hi element is also used to encode the varying rendition of punctuation or words within a phrase-level element. For instance, if a persName element surrounds an entire phrase, some of which is highlighted, hi should be used to encode these renditional shifts - except in the case of possessives attached to names. See 091 for more on this. In general, hi is used to designate highlighting which does not convey linguistic content; thus the renditional characteristics recorded on hi could be suppressed on output without thereby losing any indicators of textual meaning.
We do not use hi as a holding tank for elements awaiting further thought. This is a terminal tag. Words whose encoding is uncertain should be encoded with unknown.
Where individual letters within a word are intentionally highlighted to convey a special meaning (as for instance in the prophetic tracts of Eleanor Davies), we encode them using emph. (See 062 on emphasis.)
The WWP has added a type attribute for hi. The only value currently specified for this attribute is “dic”, which is used to designate distinctive initial capitals (capital letters which are decorated or oversized). Instances of this would appear as: <p><hi type="dic">Y<hi>ou are late!</p>; see 033 for more on this.