<b> and <i> were never deprecated. They are perfectly valid in HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 and were basically treated like <span> except with default styling. No s

<b> and <i> were never deprecated. They are perfectly valid in HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 and were basically treated like <span> except with default styling. No semantic web person would have said <strong> and <em> “replaced” <b> and <i> except for the specific cases where <strong> and <em> are semantically appropriate. For example, italicizing ship names with <em> has always been wrong.