Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
Because even though <em> and <i> may look the same when rendered as text, they have different semantics and may be interpreted differently, for example, by a text-to-speech system.
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Yes, that is the official and logical explanation. I've yet to find ANYTHING that does treat them differently, unless there is specific CSS added by ebook "publisher" or webpage designer. Nor do I know how to create an <em> in source text other than editing HTML directly.
I've created audiobooks (even 30 years ago on cassette). Obviously being a human and then using printed material the source would only have normal, bold, italic, bold italic, all caps and occasionally smaller text (as well as a whisper speech tag). You'd decide from context, not the print style, if you needed to talk faster, slower, louder, softer, whisper, shout, raise pitch, speak with flat intonation, rise pitch at the end of a sentence, speak excitedly. The —, …, ! or ? at the end of dialogue or the speech tag or tag action would be more of a guide than print style.
Computer software is rubbish at context. I've not heard text to speech improve much in thirty five years, it does sound a bit more human. But compared to even an inexperienced human it's rubbish.
So I'm sceptical. I suspect the <em> is something some HTML guru thought up and it's not really important. How would I decide to use <i> or <em>. The italics in printed works, like the comma or quotes, is overloaded with different uses. It might be used for a title, product name, section of verse, indication of a handwritten letter, emphasis (not common), character's thoughts or actual telepathy. We also have the Bang (Exclamation mark or Shriek) for a certain kind of emphasis as well as the Query, which is not always a straight question, could be followed by 'she exclaimed'. The Interobang never caught on.
Using italics for actual semantic emphasis is rare.
The double quote and single quote in straight versions come from the typewriter.
Different languages even have differing conventions for these things and for indicating dialogue, quotes, meta-usage (the '*' can be a wild card is using ' to indicate meta), titles etc.
So being lazy and not wishing to edit HTML at all (though I used to for websites) or edit CSS, I can't find a use for <em>. Perhaps there is some style in my wordprocessor that generates the <em> in HTML+CSS conversion, but I don't know it. Normal, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, styled indents, kinds of justification, inter-paragraph spacing, superscript, subscript, etc all automatically generate the expected HTML.
All four common dashes (hyphen, minus, en and em) and the non-breaking space can be typed easily in the wordprocessor and show up differently (the minus and hyphen do look similar and I never use the minus as I only edit fiction). The non-binding space is typed by Shft-Cnrl-space and is shown as greyed space.