- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 09:57:42 -0700
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Cc: Philip & Le Khanh <Philip-and-LeKhanh@Royal-Tunbridge-Wells.Org>, public-html@w3.org
Maciej Stachowiak wrote: > > > On May 6, 2007, at 11:00 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote: > >> Maciej Stachowiak wrote: >>> For HTML, there is no significant distinction in attested use between >>> <em> and <i>. In practice they are used in the same kinds of >>> contexts. However, there is a nominal difference in the spec. >> >> What do you base this on? >> >> I have seen <i> used for a range of things, most commonly to indicate >> emphasis or to indicate quoting. In other words my experience has been >> that people use it when they want italics which can be desired for a >> number of things. >> >> OTOH I haven't seen <em> used nearly as much so I can't really say >> what people are using it for. The few uses I have seen though has been >> by people that care about semantic correctness and has explicitly >> wanted to indicate emphasis. > > There are some WYSIWYG web editing tools that insert <em></em> when you > hit the [/I/] button or otherwise select italics -- I believe > DreamWeaver is one of them. This alone makes it pretty likely that > there's a significant amount of content out there using <em> for > non-italic emphasis. I suspect there are also some authors who use <em> > in place of <i> always, because they've heard it's more semantic. Ugh, that is really unfortunate. I guess what we can do to fix this is to explicitly state in the spec or a primer that this is a bad practice. And that wysiwyg editors should either use <i> or CSS for buttons that request italics. Same thing for other visual elements of course. / Jonas
Received on Monday, 7 May 2007 16:57:47 UTC