Mastering GUI Programming with Python

Semantic versus cosmetic tags

Some HTML tags describe how a piece of content should appear. We call these cosmetic tags. For example, the <i> tag indicates that text should be printed in an italic font. Consider, though, that italics are used in modern printing for many reasons—to emphasize a word, to indicate a title of a published work, or to indicate that a phrase is from a foreign language. To differentiate between these uses, HTML also has semantic tags. For example, <em> means emphasis, and will result in italic text in most situations. But unlike the <i> tag, it also indicates why the text should be italic. Older versions of HTML generally focused on cosmetic tags, whereas newer versions focus increasingly on semantic tags.

Qt's rich-text ...