[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Have you ever seen an eBook that uses <em> where it was not just italic? I've not seen such.

If you saw a book that properly used <em> and <i>, would you finally stop this tomfoolery?

I have one right from 2021:

• "Mavericks and Misfits: Non-Conformists Who Changed the World for Better or Worse" by Lawrence W. Reed (Foundation for Economic Education, 2021)

There are 31 <em>s and 187 <i>s:

<p>[...] The main reason? His father—repeat, his <em>father</em>, not him—opposed the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. [...]</p>

[...]

<p>Usually she sang in theaters and concert halls but biographer Sarah Jenny Dunsmure, in the book <i>Jenny Lind: The Story of the Swedish Nightingale</i>, tells of an incident in a most unlikely place:</p>

Luckily, a Chinese person can English->Chinese translate that and get their emphasis marks.

The Japanese person's emphasis marks will appear on different sides if they're reading top-down or left-to-right.

The Arabic person will get their extra stretchy "father".

- - -

Side Note: For more Arabic emphasis, see this answer by Khaled Hosny:

• TeX Stack Exchange: "Emphasized and italic are not taken into account in Arabic polyglossia"

where he mentions how Arabic can use these as well:

• different calligraphic style
• different color (or bolder)
• overline
• Nastaliq
  
  • The "stretchy"!

(Khaled is the creator of Amiri—a high-quality Arabic font—and does a ton of open source contributions, like LibreOffice + Harfbuzz—the text shaper now used in most OSes/programs.)

- - -

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Seriously?!?! You hate <em> so much that you'd actually use <i class="em"> instead...just to make a point...talk about code bloat.

lol. I didn't even catch that while skimming. Boy, oh boy...

The most commonly used use-cases tend to get baked into HTML + CSS. The whole point of upgrading things into HTML Elements is to make interoperability (and building toolchains/workflows on top of this) possible.

Instead of people constantly hacking <div>s and <span>s and classes and do all sorts of crazy stuff...

If you used <em>, then:

• fed this into the Text-to-Speech, it will know what to do.
  
  • Make it louder.
• fed this into the Auto-Translate, it will know what to do.
  
  • Make the marks!
• converted to Braille
  
  • Add the symbols before/after!

If you used <i class="em">, then:

• translated to Chinese.
  
  • it wouldn't know what you meant.

If you used <i class="hervorhebungen"> in Danish, then:

• translated to Arabic.
  
  • it wouldn't know what you meant.

Mark emphasis as <em>, and any/all languages/tools will know you meant emphasis, then can treat it appropriately.