The entire HTML standard process has traditionally been dominated by people with Very Strong Opinions and little sense of practicality. It's a little better now

The entire HTML standard process has traditionally been dominated by people with Very Strong Opinions and little sense of practicality. It's a little better now though. The practical thing to do was to just re-define <i> and <b> to mean what <em> and <strong> were defined as then add additional elements for when more fine-grained meaning if needed. Instead, countless of hours had to be lost on s/<b>/<strong>/g instead.