On 22-Jan-2009, at 13:27, interrobang wrote: > 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! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BBEdit Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/bbedit?hl=en If you have a specific feature request or would like to report a suspected (or confirmed) problem with the software, please email to "[email protected]" rather than posting to the group. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
