Hacker News Reader

Comment by naniwaduni | Hacker News Reader

MDN's "interpretation" of <i> has, in that span of that last one, also changed between "alternate voice"(?), "interesting", and now, apparently "idiomatic" text—I'm sure I've missed a few. I feel like it'd be a service to the world to just suck it up and let it be the "legacy italics" tag, though.

View on HN

MDN's "interpretation" of <i> has…

It’s not an MDN interpretation; this has been part of the HTML5 spec since day 1.

I linked to a 12 year-old article earlier in this thread [1] describing this very thing when HTML5 was new.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33556432

As far as I know, the spec still calls it "alternate voice or mood"; it's MDN, not the spec, that now calls it "idiomatic" text. So I stand by it being the MDN interpretation that's changed, not the spec (to pretend that it's not "we tried to remove it and failed" by making it something that at least actually starts with an I now, I guess, twice).

idiomatic is certainly in the spec [1]:

    The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or
    otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different
    quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an
    idiomatic phrase from another language, transliteration, a thought, or a ship
    name in Western texts.

[1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/text-level-semantics....

You are correct: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/text-level-semantics....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com