I think the article seems reasonable.
I'm sure lot's of people probably use <em> when they aren't really emphasising something, but simply wanting to make something italic.
Some people would argue that what you should do is wrap the element in a span, create a class and then style the class in the stylesheets. This is reasonable if the class has some meaning (e.g. author). However most people would just create a class called italic. By doing this, you are no longer really separating presentation from structure, so why not use <i>?
I think it's very good practice to code semantically. However I often find myself creating a class solely to position an element (float it left lest say). I usually try to give the element some semantic meaning (like col1) however it's always tempting to simply go for the easy option of floatLeft.
Whereas I can see a good reason to use semantic HTML, is there really much point in worrying if your ID's/classes have semantic meaning. Becasue they are user defined, there probably is never going to be a time when that information will be used by another machine.
Hi, i want to comment on Matthew Thomas' 'When semantic markup goes bad' http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2004/05/02/b-and-i Basically, i think his main thesis is plain wrong
I think Matthew is pointing out that many people are using (or suggesting) <strong> where <b> (or a styled <span>) would be better. He doesn't say that you must use <b> but explains why this element is in the specs.
Strictly spoken, <b> is purely presentational and should not replace an apropriate semantic tag (e.g. a headline), OTOH <span class="bold">foo</span> is a lot of code compared to <b>bar</b>. Both elements are semantically neutral.
Andy Budd
http://www.message.uk.com/
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