Alt or title attribute for i tag

Question

I use font-awesome and display their fonts like that:

This will display a nice little lock symbol. For

Answer 1

tags are for marking up text. You are changing the semantic meaning of this tag to something that has nothing to do using italics (and even the italic tag is a bad idea). You should be using a SPAN instead.

Italic elements do not support alt attributes, IMG elements do. If you want an ALT attribute, use an image.