Deprecated <i> still available via Markup > Font Style
interrobang
office today, why BBEdit (which was denigrated unfairly as a WYSIWYG
editor, or that it just plain sucked...) still inserts an <i></i> for
italics when the <i> has been deprecated in favor of <em>.
I even upgraded to 9.x today from 8.7.2 thinking that perhaps it would
have been corrected in the latest release.
What the story?
mjb | interrobangletterpress.com / linotypesetting.com
Brian Frick
<i> has been deprecated in favor of <em> only for instances where
you're emphasizing text. <i> should still be used for italicizing
book titles, magazine titles, etc. where the text isn't emphasized,
but should be italicized. There's a difference.
--
Brian
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Jim Correia
> Just curious, because it caused a sh!t storm of a discussion in the
> office today, why BBEdit (which was denigrated unfairly as a WYSIWYG
> editor, or that it just plain sucked...) still inserts an <i></i> for
> italics when the <i> has been deprecated in favor of <em>.
While the physical markup styles are deprecated in certain flavors of
HTML, if you want or need physical markup, then you need to use <i> or
CSS which specifies physical rendering attributes.
<em> is not a "modern" synonym for italics. It is logical markup for
emphasized text, which may be rendered in italics, or in whatever way
is appropriate to make the text emphasized for the medium that is
being used.
Jim
John Delacour
>...BBEdit...still inserts an <i></i> for italics when the <i> has
>been deprecated in favor of <em>.
I'll take my warnings and recommendations from
<http://validator.w3.org/> rather than some stormy office, and the
use of <i> is considered perfectly valid XHTML 1.1. Try it!
JD
Jonathan Lundell
> Just curious, because it caused a sh!t storm of a discussion in the
> office today, why BBEdit (which was denigrated unfairly as a WYSIWYG
> editor, or that it just plain sucked...) still inserts an <i></i> for
> italics when the <i> has been deprecated in favor of <em>.
>
> I even upgraded to 9.x today from 8.7.2 thinking that perhaps it would
> have been corrected in the latest release.
>
> What the story?
Deprecated by whom? Not HTML 4 or 5.
Morbus Iff
IMO, it's been deprecated by those who *blindly* trumpet "semantics".
Whilst I *heartily* agree with writing what you mean (emphasizing text
with <em>, etc.), I've seen it go much too far, with people attempting
to replicate tables in DIVs and CSS because, well, that's the hip and
"semantic" way of doing things in Web 2.0.
I follow the previous commenter's distinction
on I vs. EM (and B vs. STRONG) as well.
--
Morbus Iff ( my name is legion, for we are many... )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Enjoy: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.videounderbelly.com/
aim: akaMorbus / skype: morbusiff / icq: 2927491 / jabber.org: morbus
Lewis@Gmail
> Just curious, because it caused a sh!t storm of a discussion in the
> office today, why BBEdit (which was denigrated unfairly as a WYSIWYG
> editor, or that it just plain sucked...) still inserts an <i></i> for
> italics when the <i> has been deprecated in favor of <em>.
No, this is completely wrong and anyone who told you <i> is deprecated
in favor of <em> has no idea what they are talking about, and doesn't
understand the meaning and use of those two tags. They should also
probably be made to step away from any computer task that involves
HTML coding until they've had a good, strong, thorough clue infusion.
<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/index/elements.html>
Tags that have been deprecated include <applet> <u> <center> <font>
and <basefont>
There are some elements that have been deprecated for particular uses.
The most obvious example is the <table> tags which have been
deprecated for POSITIONING, but are perfectly OK and reasonable and
should be used for displaying tabular data blocks. In fact, using CSS
to create a positioning format for tabular data instead of using
<table> is just as wrong as using a table to create a menu across the
top of your page. Another common example is <blockquote> which is
often use to indent text. This use is deprecated and <blockquote>
should only be used when a multi-line quote needs to be set off from
the rest of the text. All positioning, like indenting, needs be done
in CSS.
<i> is used when you want to mark text in italics. This is the proper
way to, for example, tag a title of a book or movie, or the name of
the publishing source (magazine, newspaper), or to indicate that a bit
of text is in a foreign language. For example, the MLA bibliography
format is:
>> Books-One Author: Author's last name, First name. <i>Title of
>> Book</i>. Place of Publication: Publisher, copyright date.
>>
>> Smith, John. <i>History of the World</i>. Baltimore: Scribner's
>> Sons, 1994.
and the MLA standard says:
>> Everything that is italicized in the examples may be underlined if
>> writing by hand or
>> using a standard typewriter, but if you are using a computer,
>> italics are preferred.
If you mark this up using <em> you are simply doing it wrong. If your
professor is a pedant (and really, aren't they all? :) you will get
marked down for this.
<em> is used to emphasize text. If you are writing, "I am not going
to do that" and you want to place emphasis on the 'not' you wrap it in
<em></em> tags. Our you might wrap the "I" or the "that" depending on
where the vocal emphasis is meant to apply. This might be displayed
as italic text, but it might be displayed as bold text, underlined, or
perhaps in red text on a black background with a 1pt blue box around
it. <em> simply means "make this stand out". <em> has a related tag,
<strong> which is reserved for those rare cases when you need to
indicate an additional emphasis. For example, if you write a technical
paper you might put article reference numbers in <strong></strong>
tags to make them stand out more visually, and to also separate them
from the rest of the document structure for easy reference, finding,
scraping, etc.
And while we're all here, the same is true with <b> and <strong>.
Strong is NOT (I could have written that <em>not</em>) a replacement
for <b> and <b> is not deprecated. The trouble with <b> is that
bolding is sorta the red-headed step-child of the typesetting world,
and there are very few cases where it is actually proper to bold a
word or a phrase. In most cases I can think of where you might want
bold text what you really want is <strong>. I can't think of a good
and proper use of bold other than to want to make text VISUALLY bold,
and in that case you should use css. I'm probably forgetting something
though.
Essentially, there are two parts to HTML. There is "what the page
looks like" and that should be CSS controlled, fully and completely.
Then there is "what the page is" and that should be controlled via the
logical markup. <i> and <b> are visual (what the page looks like)
while <em> and <strong> are logical (what the page is).
One place where <b> and <strong> matter is in screen readers for the
blind. Advanced screen readers will actually shift the pitch down for
a <strong> element and, as far as I know, ignore visual markup
elements like <i> and <b>.
--
Advance and attack! Attack and destroy! Destroy and rejoice!
Brian Frick
earlier :D
Thanks for backing me up, Lewis!
--
Brian Frick
Peter Weil
"Web 2.0", than about separating structure from presentation.
On its own, the <i> tag communicates no more meaning than a <span> tag
does; however, by default it also adds a presentational/visual
component, which is probably why BBEdit categorizes it as a font-style
element. In the case of book or article titles, though, you are
presenting them in italics because they mean something specific and
call for a tag that communicates that information ("this is a book
title"). Arguably html lacks a perfect tag for such elements; some
argue that <cite> or <cite> with a more specific class attribute
(class="book") comes the closest and is therefore the best choice.
In the case of languages, there is less of a case for a semantic tag.
But html does provides the lang attribute, which at least communicates
something more than something purely visual. Here 'proper' markup
could probably include either <i> or <span> plus the lang attribute;
e.g., <i lang="la">E pluribus unum</i> or <span lang="la">E pluribus
unum</span>. Typically I use span because it is style neutral.
There's a nice article on all of this by Mike Cherim:
http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=222
On Jan 22, 2009, at 10:17 PM, Lewis@Gmail wrote:
> <i> is used when you want to mark text in italics. This is the proper
> way to, for example, tag a title of a book or movie, or the name of
> the publishing source (magazine, newspaper), or to indicate that a bit
> of text is in a foreign language.
--
Peter Weil, Web Developer
University Communications
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Phone: 608-262-6538
Email: plw...@wisc.edu
Walter Ian Kaye
electronic papyrus:
>There are some elements that have been deprecated for particular uses.
>The most obvious example is the <table> tags which have been
>deprecated for POSITIONING, but are perfectly OK and reasonable and
>should be used for displaying tabular data blocks.
I use a table for only one type of positioning, because I have never
found any CSS code with the required functionality -- and I scoured
the usual sites (meyerweb, etc) as well as trying from scratch.
The requirements:
Variable-width left column, fixed width right column, and the content
of the left column MUST precede the content of the right column for
text browsers.
All the CSS out there is for fixed left column, and the only way I
could get CSS to work was to have the right column content precede
the left, but that is not acceptable. So I use a 2-column table.
If anyone wants to spend time trying to get CSS to do that, be my guest. :-)
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it sure felt like it.
-W
Aaron W. Hsu
On 26-Jan-2009 Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
> The requirements:
> Variable-width left column, fixed width right column, and the content
> of the left column MUST precede the content of the right column for
> text browsers.
[...]
> If anyone wants to spend time trying to get CSS to do that, be my
> guest. :-) I'm not saying it's impossible, but it sure felt like it.
This is quite possible, but unfortunately, it isn't exactly perfect. I
won't take the time to write out the entire solution, but this should be
enough to give you the idea.
Usually, when you want a fixed size single column on the other side of
main text, you think about using a float. This doesn't work if you want
the right side content to be below the left, of course. However, you
can get this to work by using relative and absolute positioning with a
container div around the two columns worth of text. This will require
that the browser supports an absolute positioning using the 'right'
property, which it may not. I think the modern browsers do, but some of
the previous versions only had support for 'top' and 'left'.
There are other ways of course, but that's the one that comes to mind
immediately.
--
Aaron W. Hsu <arc...@sacrideo.us> | <http://www.sacrideo.us>
"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to
live at the expense of everybody else." -- Frederic Bastiat
+++++++++++++++ ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) ++++++++++++++
interrobang
Thanks to all for the considered responses to this question.
I'll not be petty, but I'd love to wave them in the faces of the
several people who slammed me for puzzling over use of the <i>,
especially when consensus seems to indicate they have erroneously used
an over-kill <em> for simple book titles.
mjb