Comment by combatentropy
6 years ago
Everything you say is true. I started making web pages 20 years ago. When I got a real job doing it in the mid-2000s, it was at the height of the push for semantic markup. Over the years I've come to think it is overwrought.
First, I think they could have repurposed the old tags. <i> can stand for "important," with a default style of italic, and <b> could mean "bold" in the sense of "strong" or "outstanding", https://www.etymonline.com/word/bold, with a default style of boldface type. You can still restyle them to your heart's content.
Second, italic doesn't always mean emphatic. Like I said, it is also a formal convention for: titles (books, movies, magazines), ships, foreign words, legal cases, etc. (Only of large works. For articles and other small works, you quote them. So for example, The New York Times should be in italics, but any particular article, like "Chiefs Win Superbowl", should be in quotes.)
Third, the tags are longer, especially <strong> instead of <b>. It's noisy. A quibble, you might say. But so is this whole topic. And there is a line where coding goes from fun to tedious.
Fourth, an asterisk looks stronger than an underscore anyway:
*this*
calls out more than
_this_
So you could say underscores are emphasis and asterisks are stronger emphasis, even with just one on each side.
I am very aware of the formal conventions in print but thats not the problem here. Especially in html those cases should be marked differently (like with span.class) so that can be understood by machine or screenreader.
There can any number things set in italic on page and none of them have to use <em>.
"italic doesn't always mean emphatic" is exactly the reason why i say think of it as emphasis not as italic.
Also emphasis/strong in html is mainly for general emphasis in paragraphs of text. It works pretty much like h1 and h2. The difference is that you have only two levels.