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People like to pretend HTML is semantic markup. (Semantic? No such thing exist. But I'll leave that inflamatory statement for another day).

Case in point: <em> vs. <i>, and <strong> vs. <b>. People who believe in semantic markup think em and strong are better, because they are "semantic" (are my scare quotes semantic?). But to me they are the exact opposite of semantic. What is "emphasis" supposed to mean? How is it different than "strong"? Beats me.

Semantic markup is supposed to be meaningful markup. The reality of web pages is that they are a visual, published medium. People think about these mediums visually, not in terms of a taxonomy of expression. When I want italics, I want italics. There's no underlying desire. I don't want "emphasis". I can reflect, and decide that I was intending to express emphasis, but that desire is retroactively determined, it is not my true desire at the moment when I was in the midst of composition. My true desire at that time really was "I want this text to be slanty with little curls".

This reminds me of (or maybe it's inspired by) a book I've been reading (slowly, for years), Consciousness Explained. One of its core ideas is that consciousness is what we tell ourselves we were experiencing, it's not what actually goes on in our heads. What that means is another (long) topic, but functionally I assert that semantics are a conscious process on a level that is not otherwise required for composition. By requiring that kind of thought, we are weighing down the author whose effort should really be directed towards writing, not towards typography.

(I'm writing this in ReST, which kicks HTML's butt!)