Understanding Italic / Emphasized Tags

Italic / emphasized tags are not semantic elements, but rather define how the text should appear on a page.  Bold and italics tags are used on HTML, which are now replaced by strong for bold and emphasis for italics in XHTML.

Italic / emphasized tags add interest to the text content of your page.  They are meant to have the same look on all browsers, not like some of the other XHTML tags.  To place emphasis on your text content, you can round up your text with opening tag and for closing tag.  You can also do a strong emphasis by nesting these tags: .

To illustrate how these tags are displayed by browsers, here are a few examples.  Most browsers will display these emphasized tags as italics:

italics

These tags display text content as bold, commonly referred to as strongly emphasized:

bold

These italic / emphasized tags display both bold and italics:

bold and italics

What Italic / Emphasized Tags Do To Your Page Contents

Adding these structural tags places emphasis on your site’s text content.  To give emphasis on certain phrases and words, webmasters use the bold or italic tags.  Doing this will result to the desired effect visually, but with a cost.  HTML formatting tags will decrease the overall accessibility of a page, lose promotional benefits and structural cues.  To eliminate these problems, it is advisable to use the and tags instead.  These tags might look the same but will work so much better for sites.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can create the same emphasized effects with style properties as:

font-weight:bold

CSS is now the more preferred page content format as it allows separation of the structural elements of a page from the presentation. In some cases, a page element requires emphasis due to its importance to the content of a page, like how you want to emphasize important topics or keywords.  This is where EM and STRONG tags will come in handy, which are both structural tags.

Common browsers would have their respective presentations for these tags. EM and STRONG tags are both container tags which require a closing tag at the end of the text being emphasized.  You would want to have a look to see which text would use which formatting method, as described. Even though these tags would display on browsers like they are similar, they are essentially different.

You have enough reasons to change your code, as deemed appropriate. First of all, determine why there is a need to place emphasis on specific text content.  Emphasis can be placed on important information that are contained in your text content.  You would also want to determine how you want your text content to sound when someone reads it aloud.

Content structure would indicate importance, and you have to individually identify such need for emphasis. EM and STRONG are structural tags which convey information to emphasize display of the most important text content in a page.  They are more like header tags, except that they are inline rather than block-level tags.  A browser may automatically place extra space below or above header tags, unless CSS is used in creating custom headers.

Italic / emphasized tags can be used inside header text, lists, paragraphs, block quotes or wherever there is a need to place emphasis on.