Template:Em/doc

For the em dash template, see Template:Em dash.

Purpose

The Em template makes it faster and easier to apply the <em>...</em> emphasis HTML element to text, and more importantly to indicate to human editors and Wikipedia bots they should not use ''...'' or <i>...</i> typographic italicization to replace the intentional and semantically meaningful <em>. Emphasis (<em>...</em>) 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 semantic markup, i.e. markup that conveys meaning or context, not just visual appearance.

Simple italicizing (''...'' or <i>...</i>) is purely typographic and is semantically meaningless; however, there are some occasions when simple italics are preferable to the emphasis template, most often for titles of 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 genera and below 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 uninformed replacement by bots and human editors, as well as to add web accessibility.

Usage

{{em|text to be emphasized}}

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

{{em|1=text to be emphasized}}

These both render as:

text to be emphasized

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

Optional parameters

Advanced HTML values can be passed through the template to the HTML code:

• |role= takes a WAI-ARIA role; adds role="rolename" to the HTML code
• |class= takes a class name (or multiple class names, separated by spaces); adds class="classname[s]" to the HTML code
• |style= takes inline CSS input; adds style="CSS directive[s]" to the HTML code
• |id= takes a valid, unique HTML id (must begin with an alphabetic letter); adds id="name" 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

Further information: Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Scannability

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 Template:Linktext. It can also be parsed by user agents and other software as definitively indicating emphasis, not just some typographic italicized effect for appearance's sake. Therefore, it only should be used sparingly in articles to highlight something being stressed (e.g., to represent mild vocal emphasis). Example:

• "Contrary to reports, she was {{em|not}} dead after all."
  "Contrary to reports, she was not 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 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 {{em}} is strictly for semantic (meaningful) emphasis, it should not be used for layout, typography conventions (titles, foreign words, scientific names of genera and species, etc.), and other cases that are not true emphasis. In these different cases, italics Wikicode ''...'' (which resolves to <i>...</i> in the browser or other user agent) should be used instead (or special markup for a particular case, such as {{var|...}} or <var>...</var> for variables in computer science and mathematics). {{Em}} should also not be used when the text to which it is applied is italicized for some other reason (e.g., it is part of a book title); in such cases use {{Strong}} instead. Usually avoid using {{em}} in non-quoted sentences that end in an exclamation point. And it is usually excessive to use {{em}} on terms that are Wikilinked, since the link markup acts as a form of emphasis itself.

• "The New York Times is an American daily newspaper." This example should use ''The New York Times''.

See also

• {{Strong}} – for bold rather than italic semantic emphasis
• {{Strongbad}} – same but red
• {{Stronggood}} – same but green