Gimme back my italics!
“ ‘When I use italics,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘they mean just what I choose them to mean – neither em nor strong’ ”
In another skirmish on the battlefield between loose-living creatives and scolding Nanny Markup the i element seems to have been deprecated in XHTML 2.0 (though maybe I’m wrong about this, see Jared Smith’s post here). Apropos of this, if you’re working within the WordPress editor, Nanny admonishes you with an em every time you grab for the i button. If this lesson is repeated enough you’ll grow out of the filthy habit …
However, if i has been deprecated we should mourn its loss. In the hands of a careful writer, italicization is as intrinsic to the meaning of a sentence as word-order, spelling, grammar and the use of punctuation. Certainly more than mere EMPHASIS. Relegating italics to a box marked ‘em’ is a crime against generations of writers who have enjoyed the range of nuanced possibilities on offer.
Consider this (from Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust):
“ ‘But, my angel, the shape’s all wrong,’ said Daisy, ‘and that chimney piece – what is it made of, pink granite, and all the plaster work and the dado. Everything’s horrible. It’s so dark.’ ”
Now consider the same sentence in the hands of the nutter-armed-only-with-a-stylesheet
“ ‘But, my angel, the shape’s all wrong,’ said Daisy, ‘and that chimney piece – what is it made of, pink granite, and all the plaster work and the dado. Everything’s horrible. It’s so dark.’ ”
I’d argue that, in cases like this, italics are not just presentational frou-frou. Tamper with them at your peril!
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One Response to “Gimme back my italics!”
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Italics and bold are exactly that: Presentational. HTML is supposed to be semantic, CSS is the presentation layer.
In other words, the em version is correct, but how you display it is up to you. You can choose to display it wrongly, of course, but you could do that anyway.
Evelyn Waugh used italics to indicate emphasis on those sections. She didn’t use them to indicate italics.