- From: Nir Dagan <nir@nirdagan.com>
- Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 02:22:51 GMT
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
The common statement "use <EM> instead of <I>" can be quite misleading. One should use EM, CITE, VAR, DFN, etc. instead of I. When speaking emphasizing is pronounced differently that mentioning a name of book or newspaper. Al tells as that this is the case also in Brille. In visual media they are all rendered the same. Because <I> has no semantics in parctice all media which do not render italics translate <I> to <EM> by default. (this may be ofcourse a controvertial practice; one may suggest that they should ignore the typographical hint altogether) Therefore using <EM> instead of <I> doesn't matter per current browser practice; it is more a matter of elegance and the simplicity of following the principle of using "structural" rather than typographical elements. What realy matters is to use CITE, VAR etc. when appropriate and not I or EM for all "italized" words. Some people who try to improve their documents do so by replacing all their <I> with <EM>. This is an error. Netscape composer of Communicator 4.0 replaces all <EM> <CITE> <VAR> and <DFN> of a document written elsewhere with <I>, when resaving the document, and it does this without BLINKing... Nir Dagan, Ph.D. http://www.nirdagan.com mailto:nir@nirdagan.com "There is nothing quite so practical as a good theory." -- A. Einstein
Received on Tuesday, 17 November 1998 12:21:38 UTC