- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Mon, 7 May 2007 00:06:34 -0700
- To: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Cc: Philip & Le Khanh <Philip-and-LeKhanh@Royal-Tunbridge-Wells.Org>, public-html@w3.org
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. Better than arguing it in the abstract would be to do some sort of survey for how often <em> and <i> indicate non-emphasis italics. Regards, Maciej
Received on Monday, 7 May 2007 07:06:42 UTC