I thought I’d write a quick post about something that always seems missing when I’m marking up content for a web project.  HTML provides us with plenty of tags that increase the importance/weight of text, but very few (if any) to decrease the weight.  If you want to emphasize text, you have a number of reasonable options:

• <em> – meaning “emphasis”
• <strong> – meaning “strong emphasis”
• <b> and <i> – deprecated, but accomplish similar goals
• <h1> … <h6> – headers, usually larger fonts
• <big> – may mean size, may mean importance

But where do I turn if I’d like to deemphasize text.  There are lots of situations where I’d like to semantically define some content as less important than the surrounding content.  Typically, I just use a <small> tag, but I feel like that’s not ideal… I don’t necessarily want to make the text smaller.

Here are some ideas I’ve brainstormed… I’m looking for short words that won’t interfere with legibility of inline content:

• <de> – meaning “depreciate” or “deemphasize”
• <dim> – meaning “diminish”
• <dp> – meaning “downplay”
• <ig> – meaning “ignorable”
• <less> – meaning “lessen” or “less important”
• <min> – meaning “minimize”
• <un> – meaning “unimportant” or “unnecessary” or “understate”
• <weak> – the opposite of <strong>

What do you think?  Would there be any value to an HTML tag that allows us to semantically de-emphasize text?  Do you have any ideas