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Originally Posted by Turtle91
No, they are used for styling too.
Nice and interesting historical perspective. However, historical inability to perform a function does not mean we can’t use that functionality today. The different uses just proves that current standards are needed to be followed so that deficient automated software can be updated and perform as needed.
Again, this has all been discussed ad nauseum in multiple other threads…. Nothing new to see here. Move along.
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It's ALL styling. But you are missing the point because most if not all of these standards are being created by people involved with Browser design.
Not people actually writing. Not the real publishing industry. These Web orientated have a hyper-focus on arguments and thus standards that are largely irrelevant to the content creators.
I've followed all the previous arguments on this for some years and thus decided to present a writer's viewpoint, not the view of those directly editing HTML or designing web browsers.
It was a mistake that epub was subsumed into W3C / HTML standards group. The focus of epub3 was a missed opportunity. The HTML5 and multimedia is largely irrelevant to producing electronic reflowable versions of texts also used for paper books and better done with either a browser on a device or an app.
My aim was to show that most of the argumentative post on this subject in the last few years misses the point with the focus on a mostly hypothetical concept TTS & Accessibility and standards invented by people focused on building web browsers. I've used TTS on PCs since mid 1980s, DOS, XP, Win7, Win 10, Linux. Tested DXG, PW3 and two different speech engines on Android. The pocketbook app on Android 5 using Google or the other engine is the best I've heard. Better than Pocketbook on Android 10. I've compared the same book (that has only <b> and <i>, no <em> or <strong> using TTS and human narrator. There is no issue with <b> and <i>. The books I've tried have the German, Irish and French parts marked.
I used to use the DXG to test how Americans might pronounce Irish and made up words and names.
Far bigger issue than bold or italics (which isn't an issue at all) is punctuation clues in dialogue rarely used (Only Pocketbook on the Huawei Android 5 phone) and of course zero serious parsing of speech tags.
In the DOS era & 1991 I even experimented with speech chips and DOS drivers that could use special markup. That works for a vending machine or other appliance better than any current TTS, but not practical for books.
Google's latest effort at automatically made Audiobooks won't replace humans for quality publishing, nor does it care about <i> vs <em> or <b> vs <strong> apart from the fact that almost all submitted content only has <i> and <b> as that's all you ever get starting with MS Word or LO Writer. Writers, even if SP, don't usually edit HTML.
Anyway, I've submitted my heresy and running off to avoid being burnt at the HTML5 <stake> by Kool aid drinkers tinkering with Google Chrome.
Accessibility is important. Like alt text for images that's a real description and not a caption. Anyone can do that in MS Word or LO Writer.