Semantic markup question!

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by graycyn

*IF* you are doing semantic markup, how would you treat something like:

No! No! No!

Would you mark up each exclamation:

<em>No!</em> <em>No!</em> <em>No!</em>

or make it simpler with:

<em>No! No! No!</em>

Do I Put Spaces Inside Italics/Emphasis?

Yep. The 2nd is better + more correct + much easier to read.

Spaces are a part of the entire "emphasis chunk" and are just as important!

Imagine you had a long book title:

• <p>I was reading <i>This</i> <i>Book:</i> <i>Long</i> <i>Title</i> on the train ride. It was the <em>greatest</em> <em>ever</em>!</p>
• <p>I was reading <i>This Book: Long Title</i> on the train ride. It was the <em>greatest ever</em>!</p>

Of course, the 2nd is preferred.

(It's also easier to imagine your italics/emphasis with a yellow highlight in the background! Would the space between words be included in your highlight?)

- - -

Side Note: One proofing trick you can do is temporarily use this CSS:

i {
	background-color: yellow;
}
em {
	background-color: orange;
}

It'll help you as you're skimming through your book.

- - -

Does Punctuation Go Inside the <i> or <em>?

Now, the more interesting example comes into play with punctuation!

Do you include the ending commas/periods + exclamation/question/quotation marks inside of your <i> + <em>?

It depends. But huge lean towards NO.

See my famous examples from:

• 2020: "Punctuation rules of thumb?"

where I colorized italics in RED + made it a larger font:

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Completely agree with Jellby.

DO NOT include the punctuation in the italics if it doesn't belong.

[...]

The old way would have given this in [Chicago Manual of Style] 14:

• Smith played the title role in <i>Hamlet,</i> <i>Macbeth,</i> and <i>King Lear;</i> after his final performance, during which many in the audience wept, he announced his retirement.
• Smith played the title role in Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear; after his final performance, during which many in the audience wept, he announced his retirement.

[...] CMOS 15:

• Smith played the title role in <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Macbeth</i>, and <i>King Lear</i>; after his final performance, during which many in the audience wept, he announced his retirement.
• Smith played the title role in Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear; after his final performance, during which many in the audience wept, he announced his retirement.

Would you do:

<i>Hamlet, Macbeth,</i> and <i>King Lear;</i>

Is the book called "Hamlet, Macbeth"? No. Of course not!*

- - -

* Although maybe we're not talking about Shakespeare, the famous author—maybe it's some Fakespeare guy who actually DID create a book called "Hamlet, Macbeth"!

- - -

What's This Text? <i> or <em>?

Originally Posted by Quoth

If you are the author, you can decide if Emphasised or Italic is correct, otherwise it's very hard to decide.

Strong disagree.

In the vast majority of cases, you can figure out author intended italics vs. emphasis.

For example, see my "3. "Spellcheck List" for Search":

• 2021: "What Features or Tools does Sigil Still Need Yet?"

where you can spit out a list of all (italics) in a book.

And where I showed a similar application for acronyms/smallcaps:

• 2021: "Possible To-Do List for Future Sigil Releases Post Sigil 1.8"
  
  • Scroll down to "Advanced Find/Replace (List-Based)" (especially the very bottom 2 "tables" I drew).

Seeing them in list-form, you can quickly map 90%+ to their intended <i> or <em>.

Just because you may have a hard time in the ambiguous 10%, doesn't mean you have to hold everything else back.

- - - - - -

Italics vs. Emphasis:

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

3. "Spellcheck List" for Search

[...] Past few years, I've "secretly" been using this concept of "Italic Lists" to catch typos/errors.

Splitting ALL italics, then sorted alphabetically + uniques... opens up a whole new class of previously missed errors.

<i>Wall Street Journal</i>
<i>Wa11 Street Journal</i>

right next to each other stands out like a sore thumb.

Having everything displayed beautifully in a "Sigil/Calibre Spellcheck List"-form would be super icing on top.

and Acronyms vs. Smallcaps:

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Advanced Find/Replace (List-Based)

[...] You'd probably want to skip replacing acronyms + "AD" and "BC", but apply that regex on all others:

Found   |  Replace                              |  Hits
________|_______________________________________|______
BC      |                                       |   100
AD      |                                       |    47
FIGURE  | <span class="smallcaps">Figure</span> |    10
ALEX    | <span class="smallcaps">Alex</span>   |     2
CIA     |                                       |     1
FBI     |                                       |     1
USA     |                                       |     1

[...]

With the list form, you can see patterns, double-check, then selectively apply Replaces (or Replace All just like now... just with more information at your fingertips).

Combine that with the background-color trick above, and I bet your eyes will solve most of these within a split second.

- - - - - -

Should I Mark Italics Or Emphasis If I Can?

Originally Posted by graycyn

When in doubt, I read text aloud, to see how it sounds with and without emphasis. And then do the best I can. Which is what anyone doing the reading for an audiobook or translating a text into another language is also doing. Interpreting.

Yes. Exactly.

And remember:

Think of Accessibility as a sliding scale from 0%->100%.

As long as you are trying your best, and moving in the right direction, that's good enough.

Like with HTML language (lang + xml:lang)...

You don't have to mark up every single Greek or Chinese word in an English book. But if you do, that's nice!

25% of the "foreign words" marked up correctly is better than 0%!

And if you properly mark your books up NOW, you'll auto-benefit when tools come out LATER.

(Even from 2016->2023, the tools got so much better!)

Are <i> and <em> the Same?

No!

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Jon, you constantly refuse to understand the point that “emphasis” does not always mean “italics” [...] Emphasis can be anything from color to font to underline to voice stress to normal font within an italicized phrase or whatever. [...]

Please stop bringing up this argument every time someone mentions <em>.

Yep. Especially in foreign languages, like Chinese/Japanese/Korean, that:

• Don't have italics.
• Have Emphasis Marks (little dots) over/under or to the left/right of characters.
  
  • See CSS3's text-emphasis-position + the CSS3 specs for image examples.

and other languages, like Hebrew:

• expands the spacing between characters

and Arabic:

• stretches the entire word.

This was all discussed in extreme detail in:

• 2021: "Italics and Bold"
  
  • Especially watch the great 2017 video I linked.
• 2020: "<i>, <em> or <span> for italics?"
• (And all the other linked threads.)

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

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

Yes and to paraphrase a semi-famous writer: There are more things in heaven and Earth...Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Oh and <i> can also be changed with CSS or you can use something like <i class="em">

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

And, yes, you could use css to change <i> but then you would be negating any and all readers/apps/devices that inherently differentiate a visual font-slant <i> with an emphasis <em>.

That is just bad coding...

But again, as I have said multiple times, you do you. But please don't push your biases onto people here as if they were rules. State, clearly, that it is your personal choice/preference and it is not necessary based in fact, logic, or reality.

[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.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

(It's also easier to imagine your italics/emphasis with a yellow highlight in the background! Would the space between words be included in your highlight?)

This should be the key to answer the original question. Is "No! No! No!" a single emphasized entity or three individual items that just happen to be side by side? If you were using a yellow background, would you like to see the spaces yellow or not?

In this particular case, it's probably open to interpretation, although I think a single thing is better. In other cases it's much more clear:

"Excuse me, but that wasn’t Sons of the Dessert"

"Sons of the Desert" is a title, so this should be:

"Excuse me, but that <*>wasn’t</*> <*>Sons of the Dessert</*>"

(use whatever you want for <*>: <i>, <em>, <span class="title">...)

[JSWolf]

delete post

[JSWolf]

delete post

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

SIZE="4"]Are <i> and <em> the Same?[/SIZE]

No!

What can you do with <em> that you cannot do with <i>? The answer is nothing. They are exactly the same. The only difference is that <em> was created when someone stupidly decided to dump <i>. Before they brought back <i>, you had to do <em>New York Times</em> until <i> was brought back and you could do <i>New York Times</i>.

You can style <i> and <em> the same. You can give them classes the same. No software reads <i> and <em> differently. In print, there is even less difference. In most cases <em> is used the same as <i> with no styling.

I've not seen any eBook that uses <em> do anything with it other then italicize the text.

[Turtle91]

It’s like he doesn’t even read the answer to his questions or the examples that he asks for… if it disproves his assertion it doesn’t exist. Because <em>he</em> hasn’t seen it, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in a pBook (we ARE talking about eBooks on this forum are we not?) then it must not exist…

*shrug*

I think he just likes to argue and just regurgitates the same disproven point.

I’m out.

[JSWolf]

When has <em> ever been different to <i> outside of looking at the code?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

When has <em> ever been different to <i> outside of looking at the code?

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.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Before they brought back <i>, you had to do <em>New York Times</em> until <i> was brought back and you could do <i>New York Times</i>.

Such a life saver! Of course, you could do <i>NYT</i>, which is much shorter.

While you're at it, why use <span> or <sup>? You can get exactly the the same with <i> (and proper CSS). So just use <i> everywhere. Actually, you don't even need the the text, you can get it through <i> as well, as in this proof of concept:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:ops="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" xml:lang="es">
<head>
  <title>&lt;i&gt; rules</title>
  <link href="css/title.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
  <style type="text/css">
    i { font-style: normal; }
    .H::before { content: "H";}
    .d::before { content: "d";}
    .e::before { content: "e";}
    .l::before { content: "l";}
    .o::before { content: "o";}
    .r::before { content: "r";}
    .w::before { content: "w";}
    .space::before { content: " ";}
    .comma::before { content: ",";}
    .excl::before { content: "!";}
  </style>
</head>
<body>

<p><i class="H"/><i class="e"/><i class="l"/><i class="l"/><i class="o"/><i class="comma"/><i class="space"/><i class="w"/><i class="o"/><i class="r"/><i class="l"/><i class="d"/><i class="excl"/></p>

</body>
</html>

[DNSB]

One of the best one paragraph items I ran into on semantic vs. visual markup:

Semantic Markup refers to marking up documents in ways that provide information about the content itself rather than information about the visual styling of the content. It is critical to ensure that assistive technology users can understand your document.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

I think he just likes to argue and just regurgitates the same disproven point.

Twelve years ago I thought he was probably a 10 year old. That's obviously isn't true now.

My current hypothesis is that the account is a bot.

[KevinH]

In fact, entirely new html tags are being added just to make semantic meaning clearer for accessibility reading systems:

See: the latest html whatwg spec:

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/7320

It is way past time for ebook developers to start creating truly accessible ebooks (dropping epub2 and its old html whenever possible) and start caring about semantics (IMHO).

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by DNSB

One of the best one paragraph items I ran into on semantic vs. visual markup:

Yes, text to speech, or maybe a Braille terminal. Some people are deaf as well as visually impaired. Text to speech may also be used by those with limited or no reading ability.

Top 10 Least Literate Countries in the World:
Chad - 2016 - 22.31%
Guinea - 2014 - 32.00%
South Sudan - 2018 - 34.52%
Niger - 2018 - 35.05%
Mali - 2018 - 35.47%
Central African Republic - 37.40%
Burkina Faso - 2018 - 41.22%
Benin - 2018 - 42.36%
Afghanistan - 2018 - 43.02%
Sierra Leone - 2018 - 43.21%

Note the basic qualification of "literacy" for statistics may fall far short of reading a textbook or fiction for youths to adults.
Also sematic markup potentially helps with translation.

I know what "printed" (really embossed) Braille is like, but not what a terminal is able to do. Recorded audio (since 1890s) has made a huge difference, especially when tape came (cassettes are actually better than CDs for audio books in many ways and digital files may have device accessibility issues).