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Comment by alwillis | Hacker News Reader

okay, fine, you’re all still using “i” so we’ll put it back in the standard

Going from HTML/XHTML to HTML5/XHTML5, several elements were redefined, including and .

It’s nothing new.

Here’s an article from HTML5 Doctor explaining this more than 12 years ago [1]. I hope web developers serious about their craft aren’t just now discovering this.

[1]: http://html5doctor.com/i-b-em-strong-element/

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If they wanted people to use a different tag for such text, they should have created an idiomatic tag instead of attempting to repurpose existing ones. Adding alternative elements is usually the better solution.

If they wanted people to use a different tag for such text, they should have created an idiomatic tag instead of attempting to repurpose existing ones.

If you read the spec, it mentions several different uses for , depending on the context. Otherwise, we’d need a different element for each context, bloating the spec by having special purpose elements instead of general ones.

For example, is used for ship names:

    <p>They came over on the <i>Mayflower</i>.</p>

It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to have an element just for names of ships in a general purpose markup language like HTML.

Turns out, if you look at the Wikipedia article about the Mayflower, the name is marked-up with the element [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayflower

I kind of like using for other user’s names that appears in a sentence. For example if a joker calls them self, “you piece of shit” it would be kind of unfortunate for another user to open up a dialog and it says: “Are you sure you want to delete the user you piece of shit?” Now with the user’s name in italics, this is less ambiguous.

In general I think many UXs are too shy about using italics.

Dialog window:

“Are you sure you want to delete the user you piece of shit?”

Options:

> Yes, you worthless dildosaurus

> No! Stop! I hate you!

And the actual change was made at least 15 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20071001102153/https://www.w3.or.... (Can’t be bothered finding even earlier drafts to find when it actually happened, but it could be a few more.)

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