Quote:
Originally Posted by ElMiko
Thanks, KevinH. I'd never really understood what was meant by "semantic" vs "presentational" from normal websearches. Leave it to MR to finally make the difference click!
As a follow-up, in the context of text-to-speech accessibility, does it matter where the punctuation is relative to the <em> tags (i.e. inside or outside)? I tried the following samples in calibre and couldn't tell the difference between any of them:
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The only time I notice a difference between <i> and <em> is when I am using voice output.
<p>The <i>Titanic</i> sank after hitting an iceberg</p>. will have Titanic said in the normal voice.
<p>The woman screamed <em>"Help! Help!"</em></p> would have the help help spoken in an emphasized voice (in the software I was playing with, a slightly louder voice).
Ditto for bold vs strong.
Basically, <em> is for stress emphasis of its contents while <i> is for text to be set off from the surrounding text (in the example above, the ship's name)
If you are not worried about accessibility, you can use either but I prefer to try to make ebooks that I work on more accessible.
As for punctuation? I personally prefer to keep it outside the tags but that dates back a lot of years to when my original ereader had some oddities in the font when displaying italic or bold punctuation marks. The voice output I was playing with didn't seem to care.