We've used <i> for icons before. Main reason we started doing it, I seem to recall, was that we needed some sort of element there to make the spritesheeting work easily, and a lone empty <i> is (a) short, (b) extremely devoid of meaning which might be added to it by browsers/readers, and (c) easy to remember when writing markup as i-for-icon.
yeah my best guess is that "i" for "icon", it's a good use, from the w3c "their use is discouraged in favor of style sheets." so I guess it doesn't really hurt no one, but the purists, or am I wrong?
Re:Bootstrap 2.0, From Twitter
by intranation on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @02:42AM
(#3537107)
`i` is for "italic", and that quote means that you should be using `font-style` instead of an HTML element to make your text italic.
Bootstrap is kind of aimed for HTML5, and "Font Style Elements" form HTML 4.01 got a new life in this spec (including previously deprecated S and U), with redefined semantics. Using I for icon is still wrong even by new definition.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
Edit: I wonder what motivated it. "i" for images and no one uses it to italicize text anymore?