4 ms·

Selecting a word, making it "bold", looking at the code, seeing <b> word.. </b>. Shouldn't it be <strong></strong> ?

• kijin 14y ago
  There's a reason why W3C didn't just replace <b> and <i> with <strong> and <em>. A lot of people think they're just equivalent, but a lot of other people disagree. "Please display this in italic" arguably sends a different message from "Please emphasize this", and in some settings they may not be interchangeable.
  • celoyd 14y ago
    The classic example is screen readers. A phrase that’s italicized because it’s important should probably be slightly louder, but a phrase that’s italicized because it’s foreign should probably be pronounced slightly slower. Those are entirely orthogonal things, and it’s useful to distinguish them. Semantic HTML + CSS can be taken too far, but having separate layers gives you a lot more flexibility than presentational HTML alone, which tends to be very brittle.
    • kijin 14y ago
      If <i> means something different from <em>, you can keep them distinct while keeping everything "semantic". In fact, you could have a dozen different HTML elements for each use case of italics, e.g. <foreign> for foreign words and <t> for titles of books and movies, and it will be a mess, but it will still be "semantic". So the semantic-vs-presentational argument doesn't even apply here. Meanwhile, the whole concept of using italics for emphasis is a Western idea. CJK languages, for example, don't use italics for emphasis, and most of their italic fonts actually look terrible on screen.
      • celoyd 14y ago
        I don’t understand what you’re arguing for or against here.
        • emil0r 14y ago
          CJK = Chinese Japanese Korean I believe. There is no concept of italics in those languages.
          • celoyd 14y ago
            Yes, but if anything that seems to contradict the gist of the first paragraph of the comment.
• stesch 14y ago
  The b element is back in HTML5.
• callum85 14y ago
  Just to expand on kijin's reply... In HTML5, <i> and <b> now have the deliberately vague semantic definitions of "alternate voice" and "stylistically offset" – this could cover emphasis, book/film names, key words, foreign phrases, etc. Incorrect use of the more specific semantic tags (eg. generating <em> when the user sets a film title to "italic") is worse than a lack of semantic detail. HTML5 was designed with the understanding that not all web content can be authored by someone who knows the correct use of semantic HTML tags like <cite>, <em>, <strong>, <mark>, etc. Application-level copy can use those tags, but a rich text editor (for normal people) can't know which one is appropriate, so it should always default to the vague ones, <b> and <i>.
  • justincormack 14y ago
    Why default to those? You dont justify that, you only justify the existence of a default.