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The <i> vs. <em> thing, how did I never realize that before? I guess I'd never thought about them having a semantic meaning.
by cratermoon 3y ago
The <i> vs. <em> thing, how did I never realize that before? I guess I'd never thought about them having a semantic meaning.
- lmm 3y agoThey don't. Like, that linked document is a cool idea but it's utterly inaccurate as a description of how the tags are used by actually existing website or handled by actually existing user agents (yes, including screenreaders).
- cratermoon 3y agoPerhaps the tags have not been de facto treated semantically by existing practices. There’s a great deal wrong with the tag soup pervading the web. Current convention doesn’t mean they can’t have semantics.
- lmm 3y agoPotentially they could have semantics in the future, but right now they don't. If you make a user agent that relies on them having those semantics, that user agent will misinterpret a lot of web pages.
- cratermoon 3y agoI can create CSS to style the two tags accordingly, and in within my own work I can make them mean different things to the tools I use to create and manage html.
- lmm 3y agoSure. But you could always do that for any tags, regardless of - even in opposition to - their official semantics.
- cratermoon 3y agoThere are only two hard problems in programming: cache invalidation and naming. When programmers give something a name inconsistent with it's behavior, it's going to cause a problem.
- xp84 3y agoSame. This is mind-blowing! And just goes to show how different “markup” is meant to be from “formatting.” Not that you’d know it when so much content is made by people using a WYSIWYG editor that basically tells them “you are doing formatting.”