To find this website funny? I think it's hilarious, but it's quite possible that makes me quite sad....
iCanHasCheezburgers
Also...
I don't get it, I've failed the geek test ...
seems just like a cute kitten joke to me on: 2/1 and 1/1
lolz catz are blocked here - they are funny though
I'm no HTML expert, but my understanding is that if you want italics you use <i>, if you want to indicate emphasis, you use <em>. <em> is conventionally rendered using italics, but doesn't have to be.
So if you definitely want italics, as is obviously the case here, then you should use <i>, not <em>.
Well the W3C are in favour of deprecating <i> and <b> as they have direct typeface meaning rather than <em> and <strong> that don't (though I'd debate <strong> myself). If someone is using a screen reader the note to emphasize something is meaningful, the note to make it italic is not (unless it goes "start italic 'some thing' end italic" I guess). But you are correct in using them anyway as I don't think it is until XHTML 1.1 they are deprecated (I'd look it up but apparently the W3C has blocked us ) and I'm not sure we'll ever see that really being used on the Internet (let alone XHTML 2.0).
I believe Gary's talking accessibility issues for blind and partially sighted people.
If something's marked with an emphasis tag, that can be understood by anyone, even if they can't see the screen. However, what do italics and bolds really mean to someone who has never seen print?
And how often are italics and bold used merely for decorative purposes - to make the text 'look' pretty - rather than to emphasise a point?
Rachel
I'd be the first to admit that I overuse bold for emphasis; ironically enough, partly because I find the visual difference between normal and italic text small enough that I often don't notice it.
Nonetheless, often people use <i> tags precisely because they really do mean italics. The original post is a case in point: it's a visual gag based on <I> </I> tags causing everything between them to be sloped to the right as with italics. So it makes no sense to say "should have been <em> tags instead".
Of course they shouldn't be. Which is why <i> is being removed as anything that is just style should be all part of the CSS.
Sorry my reply was really just a slight gag based around popular web standard opinions .
Nah, but then that's BBCode not HTML.
Of course! But you should still use <em> rather than <span style="font-style: italic"> as the former is semantically meaningful but the latter is not. If you like you could do something like
em
{
color: pink;
font-weight: bold;
font-style: normal;
}
to have some nice bold pink text that's emphasized rather than the usual browser choice of rendering it in italics.
Do you have an actual cite that <i> is being removed? (It's not that I doubt you, but I'd like to see the official reasoning). I had a look on W3C, the (draft) spec for HTML 5 still has <i> in there:
Even if <i> were to be deprecated, that is a far cry from it being made obsolete. And my understanding is that it would have to be made obsolete in order for browsers to stop supporting it.Originally Posted by w3c
Someone tried to make a similar gag on the ICanHasCheezeburger website:Sorry my reply was really just a slight gag based around popular web standard opinions .
The and tags in HTML have been deprecated.How I ROFL'd...
The W3C now recommends the use of and instead.
In my experience, I know a lot more people who understand BBCode than people who understand HTML, so that's a bit of a problem for anyone wanting to deprecate <i>. That is, they are saying "I want this in italics", not "I want this emphasized", so something that parses [i] into <em> is actually causing semantic confusion, not helping it.Nah, but then that's BBCode not HTML.
I am absolutely certain that if <em> does replace <i>, a large proportion of the time you see it used, it will be because people want something to appear in italics, not because they want to emphasise it. So it may be semantically meaningful, but most of the time it's going to be semantically wrong, too. Far better, in my mind, to persuade people to use <em> for emphasis which I agree makes sense, but let them still use <i> when they simply want italics.Of course! But you should still use <em> rather than <span style="font-style: italic"> as the former is semantically meaningful but the latter is not.
Last edited by David Franklin; 3rd-April-2008 at 05:22 PM.
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