I generally prefer to use tags that say something about the semantic content of the text they enclose, rather than directly dictating its physical presentation. So I'll switch between <em> and <cite> depending on whether I'm emphasising something or referring to something someone else said, even though both are usually rendered as italic. I will drop back to <i> in cases where neither of those reasons for italic is the one I'm thinking of, notably when I'm typing an equation and care about it enough to italicise the variable names. (Ideally I'd switch into MathML at that point, but it's not yet sensible to do so.)
The aim, in principle, is to arrange that if someone imposes a different CSS stylesheet on the page in their browser configuration, and it happens to treat those tags differently from each other (unlike the default one), then it should all look nice for them. I strongly suspect that in fact nobody is doing anything of the sort, but switching tags depending on context has become entirely habitual to me and I barely notice I'm doing it except when I momentarily can't decide which one is appropriate...
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<em>and<cite>depending on whether I'm emphasising something or referring to something someone else said, even though both are usually rendered as italic. I will drop back to<i>in cases where neither of those reasons for italic is the one I'm thinking of, notably when I'm typing an equation and care about it enough to italicise the variable names. (Ideally I'd switch into MathML at that point, but it's not yet sensible to do so.)The aim, in principle, is to arrange that if someone imposes a different CSS stylesheet on the page in their browser configuration, and it happens to treat those tags differently from each other (unlike the default one), then it should all look nice for them. I strongly suspect that in fact nobody is doing anything of the sort, but switching tags depending on context has become entirely habitual to me and I barely notice I'm doing it except when I momentarily can't decide which one is appropriate...