Dave Shea’s Markup Guide
I hate it when I look at stuff and realize, “Crap, I’ve been doing that wrong.” But Dave Shea’s Markup Guide zinged me in an area that really means something to me: italicization.
em
Used for denoting emphasized text. In most instances where you’d want to italicize text (using the HTML element i or otherwise) you should use the em element instead. Notable exceptions are stylistic italicizing of proper titles, foreign languages, etc. where italicizing is used for differentiation instead of emphasis. In those cases, no proper HTML elements exist, so an i element or a span element with a custom class may be preferable. Example emphasized text and usage: You simply must try the negitoro maki!
Three things:
- I used strong to highlight the portion I get wrong … regularly. :sigh: I’m a big, big fan of italicizing titles; when I see it done incorrectly—at least as I perceive it—it drives me up the wall. Biggest example that comes to mind? Bill Simmons, who uses quotes to set off movie titles. Aaaaaaiiiiiiieeee!
- I would’ve italicized [and not emphasized] the “negitoro maki” bit, because that’s not English. But that’s nitpicking.
- I’m sitting here thinking, “Crap, WordPress shows you b and i in the Quicktags implementation in the posting area, but for a logware package that describes itself as “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability,” it’s really not being semantic if it fools the writer into using the wrong stuff, right? :sigh:
I’ve been edging towards adding to my Quicktags … I think I’m really going to have to do this now, because it’ll bother me otherwise. :sigh:
Grab the quicktags from my Plugged In release – they have a few extras.
June 4th, 2005 at 17:22What are quicktags?
June 4th, 2005 at 18:32Alex: I’ll have to look at that. I spent a little time looking for where to make changes, and I never got anywhere. [Of course, I was doing Boolean searches at random, so I get what I deserve for that.]
Lara: Quicktags are right above your posting area in WordPress—they help you do formatting. You can highlight a word or phrase and hit a quicktag and then the selected formatting or action will be applied to it. I make 95% of my links with the “Link” quicktag.
Now, suggestions for better quicktag behavior are rolling around in my head.
June 4th, 2005 at 20:59I don’t use the quicktags for most stuff. But I do use the link quicktag a lot, and I ocassionally use the ul/li ones.
Anyhow, the decision to label the buttons ‘b’ and ‘i’ while using the tags ’strong’ and ‘em’ bugs me, too. I understand that this is catering to non-technical users, and I appreciate the idea behind it. But it’s still misleading. Maybe there should be ‘novice’ and ‘expert’ versions of the quicktags…
June 6th, 2005 at 12:17Yeah, I agree with you on the novice/expert bits, Dougal. I mean, I was thinking about implementations today, and I was thinking about re-naming the button [i/em/cite] and having a JS-driven popup ask the intended use of the markup [proper title, emphasis, citation], and based on the answer, inserting appropriate markup. I mean, I could use a crutch like that, and if I’m going to use Quicktags, how about making the tool help me with even more of the heavy lifting?
June 6th, 2005 at 12:26I need some “underline” tags for when I’m talking about books.
June 7th, 2005 at 17:02No, you need to use the i element.
June 7th, 2005 at 19:12