3 ms·

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

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?
stubish 4y ago
 and have always been there as long as I recall, and are part of the 1995 HTML 2.0 spec. Before NCSA Mosaic, your hypertext was being rendered on text based terminals. Most of them couldn't render italics, and for emphasis tended to invert foreground and background, use underlining, or color if you were lucky. The use of italics and bold to add emphasis started when people started using the first WYSIWYG HTML editors in the later 90s. People who had never learned HTML or even written hypertext before, concerned primarily with making things pretty. And this problem drove the creation of CSS, to get people to stop using tables for layout but never quite got people to understand and were exclusionary, except at the Universities where they had to support braille terminals and screen readers for visually impaired students.
- masswerk 4y ago
 Yes, and where introduced at the same time in HTML 2 (1995), as were and . But for any practical purpose and were ignored until HTML 4 / XHTML. I've been coding websites professionally since 1996 and I do not recall encountering these tags in the wild. (When I started, the use of head and body elements was the dernier cri – to be coded with . :-) ) Fun fact: the original HTML definition [1] has "typewriter" as the only styling element and uses surrounding underscores ("_are_") for emphasis. [1] http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW//MarkUp/Connolly/complete.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW//MarkUp/Connolly/complete....

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?

stubish 4y ago

and have always been there as long as I recall, and are part of the 1995 HTML 2.0 spec. Before NCSA Mosaic, your hypertext was being rendered on text based terminals. Most of them couldn't render italics, and for emphasis tended to invert foreground and background, use underlining, or color if you were lucky. The use of italics and bold to add emphasis started when people started using the first WYSIWYG HTML editors in the later 90s. People who had never learned HTML or even written hypertext before, concerned primarily with making things pretty. And this problem drove the creation of CSS, to get people to stop using tables for layout but never quite got people to understand and were exclusionary, except at the Universities where they had to support braille terminals and screen readers for visually impaired students.

masswerk 4y ago
Yes, and where introduced at the same time in HTML 2 (1995), as were and . But for any practical purpose and were ignored until HTML 4 / XHTML. I've been coding websites professionally since 1996 and I do not recall encountering these tags in the wild. (When I started, the use of head and body elements was the dernier cri – to be coded with . :-) ) Fun fact: the original HTML definition [1] has "typewriter" as the only styling element and uses surrounding underscores ("_are_") for emphasis. [1] http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW//MarkUp/Connolly/complete.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW//MarkUp/Connolly/complete....