> When I read or write something, I don’t think about bold or italics. I think about the tone of voice and which words are stressed – as if I were speaking or listening to somebody speak.

Exactly.

It’s hard for me to believe this, as I also read and write a lot, and I’ve never thought this way at all. Not even close. When I read or write something, I don’t think about bold or italics. I think about the tone of voice and which words are stressed – as if I were speaking or listening to somebody speak.

Of course, nobody would advocate that I use <toneofvoice> and <stressed> would they? No, because my intention – even if I don’t specifically think of it that way – is to emphasise particular parts of what I am writing. I don’t think in the abstract way because when somebody communicates with me, it’s always fixed in a specific medium. And even if you do think in terms of bold and italics, the same applies to you. The bold and italics are merely a surface representation, not the underlying meaning, despite the fact that up until the past few decades of human history, the two have been inseparable.

PS: I used to participate on Usenet quite a bit, where markup wasn’t available. People used *asterisks* as a substitute; which is the precursor to Markdown. Do you think people participating in Usenet think in terms of asterisks or in terms of emphasis?

When I write something using italics, I intuitively mean the same thing as when I say something with emphasis. Like this. Which is spoken differently than “like this.”

And read italics mean the same thing to me.

Now when I say something with emphasis, I don’t think at all about italics or bold or emphasis … or even pitch or volume or stress. I just say it.

Because the emphasis in speech and the italics in text mean something, it’s clear they carry semantic content.

Because they mean the same thing, it’s clear to me that that meaning is not about italics.

I think emphasis is a good word for what that meaning is about.

The EM and STRONG elements are both emphasis.

EM: Indicates emphasis. STRONG: Indicates stronger emphasis.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1

And given a finite amount of resources, I don’t know if we’ll have any more total meaning with full semantic markup, than we would have with partial semantic markup and more information (possible because of the smaller burden placed on the writer).

Also, certain conventions also come into play, such as “underline” which can be used both to emphasize as well as to follow a convention (such as when underlining the title of a publication). Should there be a separate semantic markup symbol to distinguish these two uses? Maybe, but in practice we think “underline” out of habit and conciseness. The context defines its meaning and this is commonly recognized enough to be acceptable.

The “semantic web” people seem to disregard the fact that there simply aren’t enough semantically distinguishable tokens in HTML and CSS to describe the vagaries of language (nor should there be, lest we end up with hundreds of tokens with subtle distinctions that would probably be lost or misinterpreted by 90% of readers anyway really. it. isn’t. needed.). Semantics is heavily dependent on context and interpretation. Tokens like “bold”, “italic” and “underline” describe the visual appearance of the written word and that’s really what’s needed. The visual appearance is a substitute for other cues normally gathered from a speaker’s tone, not a meaning in and of itself. Context provides the meaning. We should simply accept that the written word will never carry the subtleties of spoken word and agree that a visual description (i.e. bold, italic) is as adequate as any other subset and actually provides a much more flexible system precisely because it doesn’t try to convey meaning outside of a particular context.