Should I use tag for icons instead of ? [closed]

Answer 1

I thought this looked pretty bad - because I was working on a Joomla template recently and I kept getting the template failing W3C because it was using the tag and that had deprecated, as it's original use was to italicize something, which is now done through CSS not HTML any more.

It does make really bad practice because when I saw it I went through the template and changed all the tags to instead and then wondered why the entire template looked strange.

This is the main reason it is a bad idea to use the tag in this way - you never know who is going to look at your work afterwards and "assume" that what you were really trying to do is italicize the text rather than display an icon. I've just put some icons in a website and I did it with the following code

that way I've got all my icons in one class so any changes I make affects all the icons (say I wanted them larger or smaller, or rounded borders, etc), the alt text gives screen readers the chance to tell the person what the icon is rather than possibly getting just "text in italics, end of italics" (I don't exactly know how screen readers read screens but I guess it's something like that), and the title also gives the user a chance to mouse over the image and get a tooltip telling them what the icon is in case they can't figure it out. Much better than using - and also it passes W3C standard.