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Comment by kijin | Hacker News Reader

There's a reason why W3C didn't just replace and with and . A lot of people think they're just equivalent, but a lot of other people disagree. "Please display this in italic" arguably sends a different message from "Please emphasize this", and in some settings they may not be interchangeable.

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The classic example is screen readers. A phrase that’s italicized because it’s important should probably be slightly louder, but a phrase that’s italicized because it’s foreign should probably be pronounced slightly slower. Those are entirely orthogonal things, and it’s useful to distinguish them.

Semantic HTML + CSS can be taken too far, but having separate layers gives you a lot more flexibility than presentational HTML alone, which tends to be very brittle.

If means something different from , you can keep them distinct while keeping everything "semantic". In fact, you could have a dozen different HTML elements for each use case of italics, e.g. <foreign> for foreign words and <t> for titles of books and movies, and it will be a mess, but it will still be "semantic". So the semantic-vs-presentational argument doesn't even apply here.

Meanwhile, the whole concept of using italics for emphasis is a Western idea. CJK languages, for example, don't use italics for emphasis, and most of their italic fonts actually look terrible on screen.

I don’t understand what you’re arguing for or against here.

CJK = Chinese Japanese Korean I believe. There is no concept of italics in those languages.

Yes, but if anything that seems to contradict the gist of the first paragraph of the comment.

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