On Apr 23, 2005, at 10:11pm, Dan Carlson wrote:
I think you're missing the point, John. The way
I've found it easiest
to describe to some people is voice inflection. If you were speaking
a sentence out loud, would you speak certain words differently? Those
are the words that would apply to the "em" or "strong" tags.
But those are exactly the same words that in a written document you
would use bold or italic text for. That's what bold and italic text
were invented for. And that's exactly what people use them for. One may
not always agree with what is being emphasized but it's what the author
chooses to emphasize.
But the generic "i" tag refers to nothing
more than instructing a
visual-based user agent to render said text in italics. Any other
meaning is only derived based on a human reader's assumptions based on
the context.
How do readers handle i and em? Do they actually say "italic", "end
italic" or "emphasis", "end emphasis" or something like that, or
is
there some auditory cue used for these. Or do they simply read what is
displayed on the page, in which case there wouldn't be any difference
anyway.
Even if they do read based on the HTML tags, it was still a mistake to
include both i & em and b & strong. Readers would have had to be
updated to handle them anyway and it could have been handled
appropriately.
For example, any of the various tags would generally
be rendered in
italics: "cite", "var", "dfn" (for example). But if you
always used
the "i" tag, how would a context-less reader know whether the
italicized text was supposed to be a title, a variable, a definition,
or emphasized text? THAT is why the "em" tag is important.
I agree that cite, var, etc. do have semantics different from i/em.
It's only the i/em and b/strong dichotomies that I think are artificial
constructions without real semantic distinction. And it is the very
artificiality of these constructions that has resulted in em and strong
being ignored by most people.
John Blumel