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

[jeffa]

Why? What's the difference. I am sure that there is a good one, but i don't understand why you just say "you should this!" without explaining why. Also, if you were a nitpicker then you would have said "use <em> tags" instead, because that's the XHTML way (all lower cased elements).

Letsee, i just tested this html:

<p>this is <i>italic</i></p>
<p>this is <em>emphasis</em></p>
<p>this is <tt>teletype</tt></p>

and viewed it with lynx, which 'rendered' the <i> and <em> tags, but not the <tt> tag. If this is what you were referring to, then yes, i should switch. But i probably won't. ;)

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

[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.