Re: Italics in HTML

From: Clint Bradford <clintbrad4d(at)earthlink.net>
>>What system must he be using to NOT be able to simply read properly
>>prepared italics in HTML text???

From: Mike Eovino <meovino(at)erols.com>
>Possibly a text based browser, such as Lynx?  Have you tried replacing
<I>
>with <EM> (denoting emphasis).  Most graphical browsers translate <EM>
to
>italics, but text based ones should be able to do something else, like
>change text color or use reversed text.  And I think (I could be very
wrong
>here) some search engines score words in <EM> as more relevant.

Agreeing w/ Mike, above, it is more than likely NOT the users system,
but his browser choice instead.

There are 3 different ways to approach the appearance of your text. You
have:

Logical Styles: indicates how the given highlighted text is to be used,
NOT how it is to be displayed. Using this method, the browser determines
the actual presentation of the text. It is known that there is NO
guarantee that text using this style (such as <EM>) will always be
"displayed" italic. Therefore, you shouldn't depend on this, although
most "graphical" browsers will display the <EM> as italicized text. <EM>
was formalized in HTML 2.0

Physical Styles: indicates EXACTLY the way the text is to be formatted
(such as <I>), but, it is also known not to rely on this 100% either,
although most of the latest browsers do accept this tag. A text-based
browser, such as Lynx, sometimes can't render "visually" the physical
style. <I> was also formalized in HTML 2.0

CSS, Style Sheets: the <I> has been deprecated in favor of style sheets.
Keep in mind the support for style sheets is limited to 4+ version
browsers, and still not fully supported.

Bottom line, you could always opt to use both the <EM> and the <I>, back
to back, to achieve greater compatibility across browsers.

--
Cindy K. Stanley

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