Comment by AlienRobot

2 days ago

I think it's delicious how nobody, absolutely nobody, wants _ to mean "emphasis," they want italics, and yet despite there being a markdown-to-HTML build step nobody has ever done what they were told they were supposed to do to circumvent the semantic issue and use <span class="italic"> instead of <em>.

It wouldn't even make sense for markdown if it were language-agnostic to output <em> when that's HTML-only.

I'm going to go to my grave repeating that <em> is just <i> version 2.

3 comments

AlienRobot

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akshayshah  2 days ago

Totally fair. At least in part, I blame the choice of <em> and <strong>: it's really not clear what the hierarchy between them is, so I just think of them as the online versions of italic and bold.

<mild> and <strong>, or <em> and <emem> (or <double-em>, or <very-em>) might have been clearer, but at this point we'll never know.

Edit: apparently <i> has been redefined to be "the idiomatic text element" rather than just italic - so perhaps it's a semantically appropriate choice here after all! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

  • layer8  2 days ago

    <em> and <strong> were introduced as the supposedly semantic counterparts to the supposedly physical <i> and <b>. That never made a lot of sense, and then later <i> and <b> were redefined to be some subtly different semantic elements. Which also never really made sense. In the end, they both still mean italics and bold, unless you go out of your way to give them a different styling.