Re: <strong>/<em> instead of <b>/<i>

> > Sorry to bother with an HTML question, but where is <i> indicated
> > as deprecated?
> My bad, <i> being meaningless lead me to think of it as deprecated.

It's an important distinction between the two.  Deprecated means one
thing, and "meaningless" (by which I suspect you mean "doesn't convey
any semantic meaning") is another.

There's no reason to _not_ use <i> -- it is only important to not use
<i> when there is something else you could/should be using such as 
<em> or <cite>.

For example, let's say that you want to create a web page where the
headline is in italics.  There's no actual reason for it; you just want
that presentation effect.  The <i> tag could be used for this as 
follows:

     <h1><i>Italics Are Not Evil</i></h1>

Now, this is pretty much the same as the following:

     h1 { font-style: italic; }

Both don't convey any meaning beyond simply the presentation effect,
and they don't need to either.  (Don't be fooled by thinking that the
in this case, the CSS is inherently better or more accessible!  The
use of CSS, while I encourage it -- buy my book! -- doesn't actually
make things better or worse in this situation, although in some
cases it might.)

Now, <i> is presentational markup, but presentational markup is not
deprecated in any uniform way in HTML or XHTML.

--Kynn

Received on Friday, 25 January 2002 10:59:01 UTC