b and i

[John Gruber]

Aaron Swartz <me at aaronsw.com> wrote on 05/14/04 at 6:57pm:

> http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2004/05/02/b-and-i
> 
> More often, people switch from i to em for everything they want 
> italicized, and from b to strong for everything they want in bold. 
> Authoring software often does this — tools like the original Wiki, 
> Wikipedia, and Markdown make it easy to use em and strong, and harder 
> (or impossible) to use i, b, or any of the other italic or bold 
> elements.
> 
> This is bad. 

MPT is high up in my subscription list, so I saw this and the
follow-up, and thought about it quite a bit. I even wrote notes for
a follow-up to publish at DF, but didn't have time to complete it.

(Hence my quietness on the Markdown front overall.)

Where I think I disagree with MPT is in the implied meaning of the
`<em>` and `<strong>` tags. MPT implies that `em` is only
appropriate for cases like this:

    I'm <em>really</em> annoyed

I.e. that the "emphasis" implied by the `em` tag is only a very
specific type of emphasis, that being to place extra stress on words
to emphasize their importance. And that `strong` is the same thing,
just more so.

I don't agree with this at all. [Here are the W3C's descriptions for
the `em` and `strong` tags for HTML 4] [1]:

    EM:
        Indicates emphasis.
    STRONG:
        Indicates stronger emphasis.

That's all they say. Just "emphasis", not any specific kind of
emphasis.

So, what's "emphasis"? [American Heritage defines it thusly:] [2]

    1.  Special forcefulness of expression that gives
        importance to something singled out; stress:
        
            a lecture on housekeeping with emphasis
            on neatness; paused for emphasis, then
            announced the winner's name.
    
    2.  Special attention or effort directed toward
        something:
        
            a small-town newspaper's emphasis on
            local affairs.
    
    3.  Prominence given to a syllable, word, or words, as by
        raising the voice or printing in italic type.

MPT seems only to be allowing for definition 1. I think that if you
take definition 2 and esp. 3 into account, then it's fair to say
that `em` and `strong` have much wider applications, completely
within the spirit and intentions of the (X)HTML spec.

MPT writes:

> More often, people switch from i to em for everything they want 
> italicized, and from b to strong for everything they want in bold. 

I say, according to the definitions above, this is in fact
*correct*.

It's easy for a newspaper or magazine to declare that their house
style for foreign language words is to use italics, and to mean it
literally, because in print, italics is always available. Whereas in
HTML, literal italics is not always available -- e.g. screen readers
for the blind, or plain-text browsers such as Lynx.

I say, the reason many publications italicize foreign language words
is to put a bit of emphasis on them. Yes, it's a different type of
emphasis than that which is implied in "I'm *really* angry", but
it's still a form of emphasis. Thus I think `em` is a perfectly
reasonable tag choice for "italicizing" foreign language words.

MPT is a good writer and a serious thinker. After my first reading
of his essay, I was leaning towards support `i` and `b` in Markdown
somehow. But the problem is that MPT's entire argument is based on a
very narrow definition of "emphasis". 

Having thought this through, I now believe that `i` and `b` should
almost *never* be used. The only case I think where they're
appropriate is self-reference, e.g. the sentence:

    In headlines, use <b>bold</b> and <i>italics</i> sparingly.

And even then, why not special tags for everything?

    <r>Red</r>, <g>Green</g>, <bl>Blue</bl>


[1]: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1

[2]: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=emphasis


-J.G.