Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
When has <em> ever been different to <i> outside of looking at the code?
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Possibly with a very good Text to Speech / screen reader, Arabic and some Asian languages etc. Some writing systems don't do italic, emphasis or ordinary bold at all.
It's absolutely correct to use <em> instead of <i> if the intention is emphasis. Italics is only a Western font thing (invented in Italy, hence the name), but emphasis does exist in some other systems.
1. I try to avoid italics <i> anyway as it slows reading and may not translate.
2. Certainly there are more situations where it's just a convention to use italics, but emphasis is a real thing.
3. It's true that the <i> was stupidly depreciated for a while and some ebooks incorrectly use <em> for all italics and <strong> for all bold, but that doesn't mean <em> and <strong> are pointless or wrong. They should be used when appropriate.
4. I'd use <em> or <strong> when appropriate.
All italics, bold, emphasis, strong etc should be sparingly used in fiction and dialogue.