By default (using the quicktags) WordPress uses <em> instead of <i> for emphasis; and <strong> instead of <b> for bold. It’s not much, but it’s a modest start toward introducing people to the importance of semantics in online publishing.
Except it doesn’t. It says to them ‘<i> and <b> are bad, so you should use <em> and <strong> instead’. Which is true some of the time; but not always. If I quote something in another language it’s typographical convention to italicise it. That doesn’t mean I’m emphasising it, and if I mark it up as such that’s misleading. And I use <cite> for book and film titles because I’m not emphasising them either, but they still appear in italics.
My point is that semantic markup is the kind of subtle, subjective thing that you cannot automate (there are people, I have no doubt, who would disagree violently with the definitions above), and it’s beyond the scope of a blog tool to educate its users about it. By ‘automating’ the process it gives the impression that users don’t have to worry about these things. But this also tacitly encourages people to use semantic tags in a presentational way, which many proponents of meaningful markup would actually consider worse than using presentational tags in a semantic way.
I don’t know, maybe it’s a reference to the
<ul>s<h2>s in them.
