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

Perhaps it has no special meaning and only needs to be rendered in italics to separate it presentationally from the text preceding it.

If it has no special meaning, why does it need to be separated presentationally from the text preceding it? This run of text looks a bit weird, because I’ve italicised it for no reason.

I do take your point though. It’s not uncommon for designers to produce designs that vary visually, without varying meaningfully. I’ve seen this most often with boxes: designers will give us designs including boxes with various combinations of colours, corners, gradients and drop-shadows, with no relation between the styles, and the meaning of the content.

Because these are reasonably complex styles (with associated Internet Explorer issues) re-used in different places, we create classes like box-1, box-2, so that we can re-use the styles.

The specific example of making some text italic is too trivial to worry about though. Best leave minutiae like that for the Semantic Nutters to argue about.