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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

*<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.

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