Markdown-Discuss Digest, Vol 26, Issue 22

[Jonathan Barrett]

I used to think like this too, but HTML is all about semantics. Your  
<cite>book titles</cite> can be italicised by appropriately styling  
semantic tags, and you can use <span class="non-english">faux</span>  
tags to mark up other things.

The problem with using <i>italics</i> explicitly is that if you then  
decide that you want to have all your <i>book titles</i> appear in  
bold type, but want to leave your <i>français</i> in italics, you're  
stuck with a manual search and replace throughout your thousand page  
site, instead of just

cite {
   font-weight: bold;
}

And *that* is the real payoff with semantics ;)

-J



On 1 Dec 2005, at 7:17am, Yuri T. wrote:


> The problem is, italis is also used for things other than emphasis.

> E.g., a common use for italics is to mark foreign words, but it might

> be a bit of a _faux paux_ to put <em> around them.  Same for book

> titles.