I am not complaining that it is "strong" instead of "bold" or that we have two separate tags, and I'd be perfectly happy if bold had never existed: certainly, i

I am not complaining that it is "strong" instead of "bold" or that we have two separate tags, and I'd be perfectly happy if bold had never existed: certainly, if I actually wanted to use <b>, it isn't like anyone removed it from either the browser or the HTML standard... it is, in fact, that I agree with everything you wrote about the semantics of the situation which is why I even have a reason to be angry when I'm trying to read my hand-written markup. Instead, I am complaining that we got to allocate a one-character tag to bold and then when we realized that we screwed that up we allocated a FIVE-character tag to strong. Hell: we hadn't even run out of one-character tags!! Why not <e>...</e> and <s>...</s>?! If you really think we needed to preserve the one-character tags, that we were given a two-character abbreviation for <em> but are forced to use a five-character word for <strong> is just insulting :(.