this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
9 points (90.9% liked)

Lemmy

14281 readers
22 users here now

Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
nutomic@lemmy.ml
9
Italic and bold markup should output italic and bold text, not emphasized and strongly emphasized text (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by onehundredsixtynine@sh.itjust.works to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
8 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Currently, "bold" and "italic" markup doesn't actually output bold and italic text (semantically); instead, it outputs strongly emphasized (<strong>) and emphasized (<em>) text. This is completely wrong and semantic markup abuse, since we can't guarantee that bold text will only be used for strong importance or that italic text will only be used for emphasis. HTML output for this markup should be changed to general-purpose elements (i.e. *%text%* (_%text%_) should be <i>%text%</i>, not <em>%text%</em>, and **%text%** (__%text%__) should be <b>%text%</b>, not <strong>%text%</strong>).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] onehundredsixtynine@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

used for accessibility purposes

Screen readers do not and should not care about presentation; abusing semantic markup to indicate through emphasis that something is italic or bold is anti-accessibility.

[–] actionjbone@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Accessibility is about providing equivalent experiences. Presentation absolutely matters because bold, italics, etc. are used to indicate context. Markup exists to indicate context, not the other way around.

How familiar are you with ADA 508 and the latest WCAG standards?

[–] onehundredsixtynine@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

bold, italics, etc. are used to indicate context

How can you guarantee they are? There are no technical restrictions or instructions on how much or where you can use emphasis and strong emphasis in your message. Until that's not the case, "italic" and "bold" should be treated as purely presentational markup.

[–] actionjbone@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

They're used to indicate context because that's how the English language works, my dude.

Sure, in other languages they may not be. But it's universal in many Western languages.