The i elementone of several font style elements in HTML 4renders its content in an italic version of the font face governing the next outermost HTML container. You can nest multiple font style elements to create combined styles, such as bold italic (<B><I>bold-italic text</I></B>).

It is up to the browser to italicize a system font or perhaps load an italic version of the currently specified font. If you are striving for font perfection, it is best to use style sheets (and perhaps downloadable fonts) to specify a true italic font family, rather than risk the browser's extrapolation of an italic face from a system font.

You can take advantage of the containerness of this element by assigning style sheet rules to some or all i elements in a page. For example, you may wish all i elements to be in a red color. By assigning the style rule i{color:red}, you can apply the color to all elements with only a tiny bit of code.

Although this element is not deprecated in HTML 4, it would not be surprising to see it lose favor to the font-style style sheet attribute in the future.

The language being used for the element's attribute values and content. A browser can use this information to assist in proper rendering of content with respect to details such as treatment of ligatures (when supported by a particular font or required by a written language), quotation marks, and hyphenation. Other applications and search engines might use this information to aid the selection of spell-checking dictionaries and the creation of indices.