Semantic markup: de-empasized text?

What's the opposite of <em>?

[penders]

Possibly a minor point; possibly a finer point...

How would you semantically mark up text that you want to give less emphasis too in relation to the surrounding text? Perhaps like a side note for instance.

Something like:

Fav forum: webmasterworld.com <deemphasize>(Member since July 3, 2006)</deemphasize>

At first I went for something like <span class="less-emphasis"> which does at least separate the text and can be styled any which way, but doesn't really offer semantic meaning and is a little longer than I'd care to type.

However, what about <small>? Although this is strictly a font-style element, so perhaps does not separate style and content as may be it should. It is easier to type, displays OK when not styled with CSS, separates the text with an element that is not just a generic inline container and in my mind offers some semantic meaning... small text is text with less emphasis, right?

Any thoughts?

[encyclo]

Short answer: you can't. HTML has only limited semantics, and de-emphasis is not an option, unfortunately.

If you don't want to use

<small>

then you could use

<i>

which also is semantically neutral.

[penders]

Thanks. I suppose what I was getting at is, is it OK to use <small> for this purpose? I guess yes. Although it might not offer any true semantic meaning, I think it helps (me at least). <i> is less to type for sure, although with no style applied it tends to display the same as <em>.