Ya, my XHTML is garbage, thanks for reminding me.

The reason for using <em> over <i> or <b> in this situation is the idea of structure vs. presentation.

In an ideal world, your HTML would only mark up your content structurally ...

Why bother, you ask? (Well, even if you don't....) Because not all devices that render HTML pages are visual -- example, if someone is looking at your page on a Palm Pilot, then the palm can interpret emphasis the best way it can. Also, search engines are better equiped to deal with structural markup -- markup that signifies what type of data something is.

Once you can do all your mark-up structurally, you can use CSS to have your HTML visually styled in the user-agents that can handle it, and the ones that can't will still be able to digest it easily.

In reply to Re: 3Re: My favorite HTML font style tag is... by theAcolyte
in thread My favorite HTML font style tag is... by tye&nbsp;

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.