On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 11:56:36AM +0200, Andre Engels wrote:
On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Timwi wrote:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
- using <i> not <em> 319 bytes saved
- using <b> not <strong> 1219 bytes saved
<em> and <strong> should be used, not <i> and <b>. The reasons are complicated and have to do with accessibility and text browsers. I don't really understand those reasons myself, but from my experience it seems to be consensus to use <em> and <strong>. I think <i> and <b> are even deprecated in the newest version of HTML, or something...
As far as I know, the reason is that <em> and <strong> specify the nature of the text, while <i> and <b> specify how it should be shown. In theory, the browser manufacturer or user could choose how he wants emphasized and strongly emphasized text to be shown.
I myself am a proponent of using <em> and <strong> rather than <i> and <b>, but in Wikipedia's case I think that the change would not be bad, might actually be good. The reason is that a user will write ''text'' to put a text in italics, not to give it light emphasis. Therefore, many of our ''text''s should not be <em>, but <cite>. Because this cannot be machine-handled anyway, we might as well stop pretending that we do so.
In Recent Changes italics is used for look only, not for emphasis, so you're right here.