4 ms·

What stops screen readers from treating the tag the same way they treat the tag? If functionally ends up doing the same thing that did, what's

by imgabe 4y ago

What stops screen readers from treating the tag the same way they treat the tag? If functionally ends up doing the same thing that did, what's the point?

reaperducer 4y ago
 for things that should be italic for visual reasons. For example, the titles of books. for things that are emphasized, as in emphatic expressions within text. For example "You'll get nothing and you'll like it."
- gnubison 4y ago
 *<cite>
 - Tomte 4y ago
 <cite> is also pure joy. From MDN: > It's worth noting that the W3C specification says that a reference to a creative work, as included within a <cite> element, may include the name of the work's author. However, the WHATWG specification for <cite> says the opposite: that a person's name must never be included, under any circumstances.
 - josteink 4y ago
 In short, if you want to avoid making errors, just don’t use <cite>.
 - jll29 4y ago
 I find this interesting, and wish the W3C could work this out more: In one possible future, 'cite' elements (and the absence thereof) could be used to inform/assist human and automatic fact checking.
 - mananaysiempre 4y ago
 There are also other things that are not emphasized, but require italics per typographical convention, e.g. foreign-language fragments.
 - nirimda 4y ago
 It doesn't have clear semantics. <cite> is basically used as "I want something in italics, and it is the title of something" rather than "here is a reference to a creative work". And it gives the lie to semantic markup: we only ever have semantic markup for things we can reasonably expect to be visually set-off. Something like a persons name or a cut-off phrase are never marked up semantically; there could be massive benefits from semantically attributing lists of city/state combinations in flowing text but it just doesn't happen. There's nothing more than semantically attributed visual markup, rather than being semantic markup, and this kind of renaming of is just going overboard.
- yakubin 4y ago
 TIL. ~15 years ago I read "don't use , use ", and so I did. Now it seems I need to go and change a bunch of s to s.
stubish 4y ago
A screen reader that did this would need to heuristically determine if the speech should be emphasized or not. Because you don't emphasize much of what is read when reading italicized text.
- masswerk 4y ago
  The point being, if italics were already used to add emphasis and to separate an expression from the rest of the utterance, why was a dedicated tag required to express emphasis? (The heuristics only apply now, as there are two kinds of emphasis, which introduces some uncertainty of how things should be expressed. Moreover, as type styles have moved to CSS, there's a chance that a screen reader presentation may miss an intended separation of text.)
  - Yoric 4y ago
    In terms of typography, italics are also applied for titles, for quotes (in some contexts), for foreign expressions, sometimes for dialogs, and sometimes simply because they are easier to read. For a screen reader, you don't want to emphasize these use cases.
    - masswerk 4y ago
      They are still used to separate that expression, to make the expression stand out from the rest of the text. Surely, if I set a quote in italics, I mean this to be read in a distinctive voice by an aural presentation. (This is the entire point of separating it by a distinctive type style. I'm actually somewhat alarmed that this isn't the case.) Edit: There's a clear meaning to the use of distinctive type styles. I don't see an intrinsic value in pretending and that there is no such intended meaning and that there should be an artificial separation, rather than generalizing on presentation styles. Edit #2: In Antiqua, italics isn't just oblique text, it's an entirely different script. So what is the use case and the intended meaning of using a different script? Isn't this more conceptual than just using a fancy visual presentation style, which may be happily ignored in any other representation as there's probably no intended meaning to this?
  - 4y ago

by imgabe 4y ago

What stops screen readers from treating the tag the same way they treat the tag? If functionally ends up doing the same thing that did, what's the point?

reaperducer 4y ago

for things that should be italic for visual reasons. For example, the titles of books. for things that are emphasized, as in emphatic expressions within text. For example "You'll get nothing and you'll like it."

gnubison 4y ago
*<cite>
- Tomte 4y ago
 <cite> is also pure joy. From MDN: > It's worth noting that the W3C specification says that a reference to a creative work, as included within a <cite> element, may include the name of the work's author. However, the WHATWG specification for <cite> says the opposite: that a person's name must never be included, under any circumstances.
 - josteink 4y ago
 In short, if you want to avoid making errors, just don’t use <cite>.
 - jll29 4y ago
 I find this interesting, and wish the W3C could work this out more: In one possible future, 'cite' elements (and the absence thereof) could be used to inform/assist human and automatic fact checking.
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
 There are also other things that are not emphasized, but require italics per typographical convention, e.g. foreign-language fragments.
- nirimda 4y ago
 It doesn't have clear semantics. <cite> is basically used as "I want something in italics, and it is the title of something" rather than "here is a reference to a creative work". And it gives the lie to semantic markup: we only ever have semantic markup for things we can reasonably expect to be visually set-off. Something like a persons name or a cut-off phrase are never marked up semantically; there could be massive benefits from semantically attributing lists of city/state combinations in flowing text but it just doesn't happen. There's nothing more than semantically attributed visual markup, rather than being semantic markup, and this kind of renaming of is just going overboard.
yakubin 4y ago
TIL. ~15 years ago I read "don't use , use ", and so I did. Now it seems I need to go and change a bunch of s to s.

stubish 4y ago

A screen reader that did this would need to heuristically determine if the speech should be emphasized or not. Because you don't emphasize much of what is read when reading italicized text.

masswerk 4y ago
The point being, if italics were already used to add emphasis and to separate an expression from the rest of the utterance, why was a dedicated tag required to express emphasis? (The heuristics only apply now, as there are two kinds of emphasis, which introduces some uncertainty of how things should be expressed. Moreover, as type styles have moved to CSS, there's a chance that a screen reader presentation may miss an intended separation of text.)
- Yoric 4y ago
  In terms of typography, italics are also applied for titles, for quotes (in some contexts), for foreign expressions, sometimes for dialogs, and sometimes simply because they are easier to read. For a screen reader, you don't want to emphasize these use cases.
  - masswerk 4y ago
    They are still used to separate that expression, to make the expression stand out from the rest of the text. Surely, if I set a quote in italics, I mean this to be read in a distinctive voice by an aural presentation. (This is the entire point of separating it by a distinctive type style. I'm actually somewhat alarmed that this isn't the case.) Edit: There's a clear meaning to the use of distinctive type styles. I don't see an intrinsic value in pretending and that there is no such intended meaning and that there should be an artificial separation, rather than generalizing on presentation styles. Edit #2: In Antiqua, italics isn't just oblique text, it's an entirely different script. So what is the use case and the intended meaning of using a different script? Isn't this more conceptual than just using a fancy visual presentation style, which may be happily ignored in any other representation as there's probably no intended meaning to this?
- 4y ago

What stops screen readers from treating the <i> tag the same way they treat the <em> tag? If <em> functionally ends up doing the same thing that <i> did, what's

What stops screen readers from treating the <i> tag the same way they treat the <em> tag? If <em> functionally ends up doing the same thing that <i> did, what's