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Comment by aylmao | Hacker News Reader

> What has semantic HTML ever done for us?

For us small things, like enable reader views. For people with disabilities, it lets them effectively use screen readers.

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The accessibility aspect is huge and deserves more attention and kudos than it gets.

Also, from a purely selfish aspect, I vastly prefer documents with at least a minimum of semantic organization, even if it's just header, footer, main, and meaningful heading levels.

Without those, well, it's just a document full of undifferentiated text with various attributes to distinguish it visually or typographically, and usually inconsistently used. Is this piece of text styled "bold with fontsize 16" supposed to be a second or 3rd level header?

What stops screen readers from treating the tag the same way they treat the tag? If functionally ends up doing the same thing that did, what's the point?

for things that should be italic for visual reasons. For example, the titles of books.

for things that are emphasized, as in emphatic expressions within text. For example "You'll get nothing and you'll like it."

*<cite>

<cite> is also pure joy. From MDN:

> It's worth noting that the W3C specification says that a reference to a creative work, as included within a <cite> element, may include the name of the work's author. However, the WHATWG specification for <cite> says the opposite: that a person's name must never be included, under any circumstances.

In short, if you want to avoid making errors, just don’t use <cite>.

I find this interesting, and wish the W3C could work this out more: In one possible future, 'cite' elements (and the absence thereof) could be used to inform/assist human and automatic fact checking.

There are also other things that are not emphasized, but require italics per typographical convention, e.g. foreign-language fragments.

It doesn't have clear semantics. <cite> is basically used as "I want something in italics, and it is the title of something" rather than "here is a reference to a creative work". And it gives the lie to semantic markup: we only ever have semantic markup for things we can reasonably expect to be visually set-off. Something like a persons name or a cut-off phrase are never marked up semantically; there could be massive benefits from semantically attributing lists of city/state combinations in flowing text but it just doesn't happen. There's nothing more than semantically attributed visual markup, rather than being semantic markup, and this kind of renaming of is just going overboard.

TIL. ~15 years ago I read "don't use , use ", and so I did. Now it seems I need to go and change a bunch of s to s.

A screen reader that did this would need to heuristically determine if the speech should be emphasized or not. Because you don't emphasize much of what is read when reading italicized text.

The point being, if italics were already used to add emphasis and to separate an expression from the rest of the utterance, why was a dedicated tag required to express emphasis?

(The heuristics only apply now, as there are two kinds of emphasis, which introduces some uncertainty of how things should be expressed. Moreover, as type styles have moved to CSS, there's a chance that a screen reader presentation may miss an intended separation of text.)

In terms of typography, italics are also applied for titles, for quotes (in some contexts), for foreign expressions, sometimes for dialogs, and sometimes simply because they are easier to read. For a screen reader, you don't want to emphasize these use cases.

They are still used to separate that expression, to make the expression stand out from the rest of the text. Surely, if I set a quote in italics, I mean this to be read in a distinctive voice by an aural presentation. (This is the entire point of separating it by a distinctive type style. I'm actually somewhat alarmed that this isn't the case.)

Edit: There's a clear meaning to the use of distinctive type styles. I don't see an intrinsic value in pretending and that there is no such intended meaning and that there should be an artificial separation, rather than generalizing on presentation styles.

Edit #2: In Antiqua, italics isn't just oblique text, it's an entirely different script. So what is the use case and the intended meaning of using a different script? Isn't this more conceptual than just using a fancy visual presentation style, which may be happily ignored in any other representation as there's probably no intended meaning to this?

and have always been there as long as I recall, and are part of the 1995 HTML 2.0 spec. Before NCSA Mosaic, your hypertext was being rendered on text based terminals. Most of them couldn't render italics, and for emphasis tended to invert foreground and background, use underlining, or color if you were lucky. The use of italics and bold to add emphasis started when people started using the first WYSIWYG HTML editors in the later 90s. People who had never learned HTML or even written hypertext before, concerned primarily with making things pretty. And this problem drove the creation of CSS, to get people to stop using tables for layout but never quite got people to understand and were exclusionary, except at the Universities where they had to support braille terminals and screen readers for visually impaired students.

Yes, and where introduced at the same time in HTML 2 (1995), as were and . But for any practical purpose and were ignored until HTML 4 / XHTML. I've been coding websites professionally since 1996 and I do not recall encountering these tags in the wild. (When I started, the use of head and body elements was the dernier cri – to be coded with . :-) )

Fun fact: the original HTML definition [1] has "typewriter" as the only styling element and uses surrounding underscores ("_are_") for emphasis.

[1] http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW//MarkUp/Connolly/complete....

Modern web developers don't use semantic HTML for screen reader support. They manually apply screen reader interpretation data the same way they manually apply Tailwind styles to every element. (That's what WAI-ARIA is for, most notably the "role" attribute.)

Most of the new HTML5 elements (main, aside, article, section, nav…) have an implicit ARIA role, no need to add one manually.

A lot of the old ones do too, but elements not named <div> are an elitist conspiracy to prevent people from becoming web developers.

Sounds like a rat's nest of fragility. :(

Relevant: https://www.stefanjudis.com/today-i-learned/em-and-strong-ar...

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