Way back, when I upgraded my personal site to WordPress 2.0 and began playing with the new WYSIWYG post editor, I noticed something about the bold and italic buttons in the tag helper bar: they say bold and italic but they output strong and em, respectively.
There’s been a push in the developer community to begin using markup that has more meaning, and in many cases <em> makes more sense than the presentational markup of the <i> tag, specifically when you want to give emphasis to the enclosed word or phrase. I mean, that’s the point of the <em> tag. Now many coders and developers are always using the <em> tag instead of <i>, falsely believing <i> and <b> to be deprecated (only <u> has been deprecated as of HTML 4.01).
But should we all go back into our code and change every isntance of <i> to <em>? I think not. There are plenty of perfectly good pieces of text that you would want to italicize, but you don’t necessarily want to emphasize.
Italics are used to indicate titles of longer works (albums, periodicals, television series, plays and films), foreign words that have entered English vocabulary (de rigueur, resume), and words or phrases used as themselves (the term computer, the letter A).
For example, I write a post about a certain book, perhaps a review. According to various guidelines for writing, titles of books written on the web should be in italics, since underlining is not only confusing, but a web standards faux pas.
I don’t want to emphasize the book’s title, but I do want to be grammatically correct. However, this brings up the debate over the practice of using presentational markup vs. separating style from content, and until we’re all writing XML and defining our own <booktitle> tags, I’ll keep using <i>.
When I originally posted this article to my website on 10 January 2006, someone commented that “[y]ou should use the cite tag for … citing the names of books and such.” However, I don’t know if the cite tag is appropriate, since I’m not citing a book or reference, just mentioning it. If I were to publish a research paper online, then I would use cite and blockquote quite often. This doesn’t seem the case to me here.
