[cfq]

I read the HTML and wondered what I should be making of it. So I took a trip down to the old HTML5 specification at: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/text-level-semantics.html

"The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts."

"The b element represents a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian purposes without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of an alternate voice or mood, such as key words in a document abstract, product names in a review, actionable words in interactive text-driven software, or an article lede."

And none of that markup made any sense to me.

[alanh]

Hey, they’re empty — the markup is irrelevant. The only reason I didn’t just use pseudo-elements is so this would work in IE7 and older. <b> and <i> were quick and easy to type. I would not recommend copy and pasting any of the code on the page, just the technique, if a scalable, fast-loading arrow is desired :)