<em> does have its uses. If you have an entire paragraph that's styled as italic and you want to emphasis something within that, usually what you do is make the

<em> does have its uses. If you have an entire paragraph that's styled as italic and you want to emphasis something within that, usually what you do is make the emphasized span non-italic. Italicized paragraphs or long spans are more common than you might guess. Sometimes they're used to indicate speakers in a dialog or to signify editorialized interjections. No idea if browsers are smart enough to render nested <em>'s this way now without specialized CSS.