For some reason, emph does not work with latex2html . Hence, there is a small macro that generally does the job for me:
\newcommand{\italics}[1]{ \latexhtml{\emph{#1}}{\begin{rawhtml} <i> \end{rawhtml} #1 \begin{rawhtml} </i> \end{rawhtml}} }
Now I can use
\italics{Anything I want}quite liberally. Also, since it uses latexhtml , I can compile it using latex alone too (necessary to obtain cross references.)