HTML Tag

The tag specifies a text that has stress emphasis. Browsers display the text within this tag in italic.

The tag is an element of logical markup in contrast to the tag, which has the same visual effect (italic), but at the same time, doesn’t carry a semantic load.

The tag is not deprecated, but it is possible to achieve richer effects with CSS font-style property .

The tag is considered to be a phrase tag, which points out that a section of the text has a structural meaning.

Syntax

The tag comes in pairs. The content is written between the opening () and closing () tags.

Example of the HTML tag:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Title of the document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>It is a normal paragraph</p>
    <p>The important part of the text is highlighted by the <em> in italic</em>.</p>
  </body>
</html>

Try it Yourself »

Result

The difference between the and the tags

The and tags are usually confused, because they create similar results because both of them italicize the text. However, the results are the same only visually. The element specifies the text that has stress emphasis, while the tag defines a part of the text in a different voice. It is usually used to define technical terms, phrases from foreign languages, etc.

Attributes

The tag supports the Global Attributes and the Event Attributes.

How to style tag?

Common properties to alter the visual weight/emphasis/size of text in tag:

CSS font-style property sets the style of the font. normal | italic | oblique | initial | inherit.
CSS font-family property specifies a prioritized list of one or more font family names and/or generic family names for the selected element.
CSS font-size property sets the size of the font.
CSS font-weight property defines whether the font should be bold or thick.
CSS text-transform property controls text case and capitalization.
CSS text-decoration property specifies the decoration added to text, and is a shorthand property for text-decoration-line, text-decoration-color, text-decoration-style.

Coloring text in tag:

CSS color property describes the color of the text content and text decorations.
CSS background-color property sets the background color of an element.

Text layout styles for tag:

CSS text-indent property specifies the indentation of the first line in a text block.
CSS text-overflow property specifies how overflowed content that is not displayed should be signalled to the user.
CSS white-space property specifies how white-space inside an element is handled.
CSS word-break property specifies where the lines should be broken.

Other properties worth looking at for tag:

CSS text-shadow property adds shadow to text.
CSS text-align-last property sets the alignment of the last line of the text.
CSS line-height property specifies the height of a line.
CSS letter-spacing property defines the spaces between letters/characters in a text.
CSS word-spacing property sets the spacing between words.