Something worth reading: http://html5doctor.com/i-b-em-strong-element/
<i> — was italic, now for text in an “alternate voice”, such as
transliterated foreign words, technical terms, and typographically italicized
text (W3C:Markup, WHATWG)
<b> — was bold, now for “stylistically offset” text, such as keywords and
typographically emboldened text (W3C:Markup, WHATWG)
<em> — was emphasis, now for stress emphasis, i.e., something you’d
pronounce differently (W3C:Markup, WHATWG)
<strong> — was for stronger emphasis, now for strong importance, basically
the same thing (stronger emphasis or importance is now indicated by nesting)
(W3C:Markup, WHATWG)
Greg
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Philip Taylor
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2014 2:02 PM
To: Robert A. Rosenberg
Cc: CSS-Discuss Discuss
Subject: Re: [css-d] Will the unsemantic HTML elements B and I be soon phased
out?
Robert A. Rosenberg wrote:
> The use of <em> and <strong> in lieu of <i> and <b> is aimed NOT at
> the visual presentation (ignoring screwing with the em->i and
> strong->b mappings via CSS) but at AUDIO (ie: Screen Reader) presentation.
I would respectfully disagree. Whereas <b> and <i> were targetted specifically
at visual rendering (since they denote "bold" and "italic", which are not
inherently meaningful for other media), <em> and <strong> are targetted at
/all/ forms of rendering, since "emphasised" and "strongly emphasised" are
media-neutral. They do, of course, work well with audio renderers but equally
well with visual renderers.
This is, I believe, an important point, because if it is not stressed, those
writing for purely visual media may still perceive no need to use <em> and
<strong>; it would have the unfortunate effect of relegating them to
second-class citizens in the markup world, whereas in fact it is <i> and <b>
(and their ilk) that need to be relegated, then deprecated, and finally
forgotten.
> Of course, the text-to-speech
> mapping could in theory treat i the same way as it treats em,
Yes, it /could/; but it would be guessing in the dark. There is no way to know
whether an author who wrote <i>Felix domesticus<i> or <i>τέλος</i> intended
them to be emphasised or not from the markup alone.
Philip Taylor
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