Re: 3Re: My favorite HTML font style tag is...

[theAcolyte]

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 ...

• <em> rather then <i> or <b> for emphasis
• <code> rather then <pre> for mono-spaced code
• <h1> for a headline instead of <font>

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.