But... I am, surely, not advocating for people using <b> now: I'm merely lamenting that we allocated a one-character tag for <b> and then resorted to a five-cha

But... I am, surely, not advocating for people using <b> now: I'm merely lamenting that we allocated a one-character tag for <b> and then resorted to a five-character tag for <strong>, as it affects the readability (I couldn't care less about how many characters it is to type) of the un-rendered/hand-written document. (Hell: it isn't even clear that I'm "advocating" for anything at all; at best it would be "don't bother with HTML/Markdown, as both ended up making poor choices for readability of your source document: instead, use a custom markup/markdown and then have code--on your server--to render it into the appropriate semantic HTML". Yet, while that is how my blog used to work, I actually failed to reallocate the tag names.) I do, in fact, carefully use <strong> in my HTML documents (though I'm now starting to wonder if that's wrong, per the sister comment which linked us to the standard; it, surprisingly-to-me, does seem like I'm "supposed to be using" <i> in most, if not all, of the places I've been using <em>...), and I've been known to go to pretty extreme lengths to correctly support various accessibility technologies in my code, both on the web and native. It simply makes me a bit angry, every time I see it, that someone decided to make such a common element <strong> instead of, say, <s>, which I believe is a reasonable position and has nothing to do with accessibility, as we could have named the new tag <powerful> and it would have worked the same and yet clearly that would have been even worse than <strong> ;P. We should get to separately judge--and even potentially lament one of--these two decisions. (I'm thereby going to assert pretty directly that your decision to insult me by calling a narcissist is based on you not bothering to read what I wrote or pay attention to the actual thing I was complaining about--as I'd in fact have no reason to complain if I didn't care about the same thing you do: no one removed <b> from either the standard or the implementation--and just ran with a knee-jerk interpretation of some of the keywords I used.)