Quote:
Originally Posted by Karellen
Not sure how accurate my info is but...
I have read that the tags <i></i> and <bold></bold> are deprecated and <em></em> and <strong></strong> are the preferred tags to use for italics and bold.
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That's old info.
HTML4 (wrongly) deprecated <i> + <b>, but HTML5 reintroduced them.
Now all 4 have their uses.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
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Here's the basic difference:
Italics <i> vs. Emphasis <em>
Code:
In <i>Example Book Title</i>, Tex said: "I am the <em>greatest</em>."
The answer, <em>obviously</em>, is <i>ipso facto</i>.
The answer to <i>x</i> + 2 = 5 is <i>x</i> = 3.
<em> is easy. You use that for emphasizing words.
<i> is used when the text itself is italics, for presentational reasons. Things like:
- Book Titles
- Ship names
- "Foreign" words/terms
- Math variables (x, y, z, ...)
Bold <b> vs. Strong <strong>
Similar case with these (although these are a little odder).
An easy example is things like transcripts:
Code:
<b>Person A:</b> Is this what you meant?
<b>Person B:</b> Yes. That is what I said.
<b>A:</b> Are you sure?
<b>B:</b> You're goddamn right I'm sure!
Sometimes the person's name is formatted bold. Any special reason why it's bold? Nope. That's just the common transcript formatting.
Where <strong> is more like a "WARNING!" or "IMPORTANT!" or "strong emphasis"-type thing:
Code:
The sign said: <strong>Do not feed the monkeys!</strong>
Anyway, read through those 2 threads DNSB linked to. I go into extreme detail + give examples on all the differences.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
It's a philosophical/political thing that some claim is about accessibility.
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It
is about Accessibility + the broader ecosystem (Internationalization).
Remember, websites/ebooks can be read in alternate means like Text-to-Speech or Google Translate.
Text-to-Speech (TTS)
This can treat/speak <i> vs. <em> differently:
If you correctly used <i>:
- "As Tex wrote in Example Book Title... the USS Cole was far from home."
If you wrongly used <em>, it might say these louder:
- "As Tex wrote in EXAMPLE BOOK TITLE... the USS COLE was far from home."
Someone
listening to the book would notice the difference.
But someone visually reading "the surface-level" wouldn't notice anything different... because "they both
look italics" to them!
Auto-Translation
Many languages don't have such a thing as "italics"... and they represent emphasis differently.
For example, emphasis in:
- Arabic
- extra lines above/below, different fonts, or extra stretched-out lettering.
- Hebrew
- bolder, underline, or larger gaps between letters (letter-spacing).
- Chinese/Japanese/Korean
- extra dots/symbols around characters.
Imagine you were a Japanese reader, and after an English->Japanese translate, every single word in your book titles had extra emphasis dots placed on it. That's not correct.
- - -
Side Note: For extra info on emphasis in other languages, I just ran across this great talk:
She mostly shows examples of Hebrew, but she also quickly skims over Cyrillic (Russian) + Hangul (Korean).
Side Note #2: Remember:
European-based languages tend to have an italics font + emphasis as italics... but the rest of the world doesn't.
And it's only by a quirk of history that both italics/emphasis look the same (in English).
Not all languages are like that!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
I create ebooks in Calibre from docx input. The wordprocessor never outputs em and strong, it only results in <i> and <b>. There can be associated CSS, and then in the CSS the class used with i or b can perversely use em and strong if you want!
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It depends on what tools you are using.
Like I explained in those linked threads:
Almost all tools output all one OR all the other. (100% <i>/<b> vs. 100% <em>/<strong>.)
Better ones like Toxaris's "EPUBTools" (or DAISY's "WordToEPUB") let you at least choose the option.
But there are some tools that can carry over all your properly marked <i> + <em>, although these are
extremely rare.
Side Note: And 99.9% of people don't even mark up their documents that detailed+correctly in the first place... just like
most people not knowing how to use Styles or
marking the proper language.
If you correctly mark up your documents while producing them though, you can map everything to <i> vs. <em> as needed.
(And there will be tools to help speed up this process in the future!)