CSS/HTML: What is the correct way to make text italic?

Question

What is the correct way to make text italic? I have seen the following four approaches:

Italic Text

I         


        

Answer 1

is not wrong because it is non-semantic. It's wrong (usually) because it's presentational. Separation of concern means that presentional information should be conveyed with CSS.

Naming in general can be tricky to get right, and class names are no exception, but nevertheless it's what you have to do. If you're using italics to make a block stand out from the body text, then maybe a class name of "flow-distinctive" would be in order. Think about reuse: class names are for categorization - where else would you want to do the same thing? That should help you identify a suitable name.

is included in HTML5, but it is given specific semantics. If the reason why you are marking something up as italic meets one of the semantics identified in the spec, it would be appropriate to use . Otherwise not.