Template:Em

Purpose
This template makes it faster and easier to apply &#91;X&#93;HTML's  markup to text, and more importantly to indicate to human and bot editors they should not use   or  typographic italicization to replace the intentional and semantically meaningful. Strong emphasis is usually rendered visually in an italic (oblique a.k.a. slanted) typeface by default on graphical browsers, but can be parsed and acted upon in customizable ways with style sheets, apps and text-to-speech screen readers. It is said to be semantic markup, i.e. markup that conveys meaning or context, not just visual appearance. Simple italicizing is purely typographic and is semantically meaningless. It is most often used for titles publications (books, films, albums, etc.), foreign words and phrases, words as words (when quotation marks are not used for that purpose), names of ships, scientific names of organisms and other cases where stylistic conventions demand italics, but they convey no sense of emphasis. The average reader, and average editor, do not and need not care about this distinction most of the time, but it can be important and editors who understand it can use this template as a baseline insurance against accidental or careless replacement by bots and human editors.

Usage


or, if the text to be emphasized contains an equals sign:



These both render as:



This template puts intentional and explicit  (emphasis) [X]HTML markup around the text provided as the first parameter. It is safest to always use the 1 syntax.

Optional parameters
Advanced HTML values can be passed through the template to the HTML code:
 * class takes a class name (or multiple class names, separated by commas); adds  to the HTML code
 * style takes inline CSS input; addes  to the HTML code
 * id takes a valid, unique HTML id (must begin with an alphabetic letter); adds  to the HTML code
 * title takes text, which cannot be marked up in any way, and displays it as a pop-up "tooltip" (in most browsers) when the cursor hovers over the span

Use cases
This template is made to mildly emphasize an important word or phrase in a passage, in a way that is (unlike simply italicizing it) semantically meaningful markup. With this technique, the emphasized text stands out from the rest of the nearby text in most if not all visual browsers and some text-to-speech screen readers (which usually ignore purely typographic italicization), without strongly affecting scannability. It can also be parsed by user agents and other software as definitively indicating emphasis, not just some typographic boldface effect for appearance's sake. It should therefore only be used sparingly in articles, to highlight something being stressed (e.g., to represent strong vocal emphasis). Example:

"Contrary to reports, she was dead after all."

It is also occasionally used for disambiguation, e.g. between two adjacent but different uses of the same word or homonym ("What it is a kind of custard.), but this usage is not often encyclopedic and can (when not found in a direct quotation) usually be rewritten to avoid the awkward construction.

When this template should not be used
Because is strictly for semantic (meaningful) emphasis, it should not be used for layout, typography conventions (titles, foreign words, etc.), and other cases that are not true emphasis. In these different cases, italics wikicode  (which resolves to  in the browser or other user agent) should be used instead (or special markup for a particular case, such as   or  for variables in computer science and mathematics). It should also not be used when the text to which it is applied is already italicized for some other reason (e.g., it is part of a book title); in such cases use instead. Usually avoid using in non-quoted sentences that end in an exclamation point. And it is usually excessive to use it on terms that are already wikilinked, since the link markup acts as a form of emphasis itself.

But careful, Em is strictly for emphasis. It should not be used for layout, typography conventions, books and such. In these different cases, italics  or  should be used instead:
 * "The New York Times is an American daily newspaper." This example should use  or an equivalent.