Interactive online courses HTML Academy
2026-03-09 12:56 Diff

One morning, Muffin cat-mails you and asks you to highlight some text segments in your entries. He doesn’t simply wish to highlight sections, he wants you to give them a special emphasis.

The following two tags are intended to be used to emphasize a word or phrase. These tags are <em> (short for “emphasis”) and <i> (short for “italic”).

Visually, both tags look the same by default—browsers will italicize the text. But the meaning of these tags is different.

The <em> tag is used to mark text that is specially emphasized and changes the meaning of the sentence.

For example, if the author of the text loves winter and does not like summer, then his speech can be marked up as follows:

I <em>simply adore</em> cold winter days!

The <i> tag is used to mark up text that is different from the surrounding text, but which is not considered to be more important. For example, you can use <i> to enclose names, terms, and foreign words. In addition, you can use this tag to enclose the thoughts of characters. Such text is usually is usually marked by changes in speech intonation. Let’s give an example:

He looked out the window and thought, <i>This simply cannot be true</i>!