Comments on: Bold Strong Italic Emphasis

By: fatboy

fatboy — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 14:50:37 +0000

too much tags to know about everyone…

By: Anne Petersen

Anne Petersen — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 22:33:41 +0000

I asked for a site review somewhere and got beat over the head for still using the deprecated and , so I think most people think that we are not to use them any more. I use them just to make particular words stand out visually, no emphasis intended.

Your explanation makes it a bit clearer – I think I can stick with and .

By: Jason Beaird

Jason Beaird — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 05:45:00 +0000

Good argument Mark. I tend to agree, especially with italics. If you only want italic styled text with no underlying emphases suggested, using makes much more sense than say, using an italic styled tag. As I said before, I started using over and over simply because I noticed a trend. I had no idea what the semantic argument was at the time and I think most people avoid and out of ignorance.

By: Mark Kawakami

Mark Kawakami — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 20:21:07 +0000

You know, I’ve thought a lot about this, and I really want to give and back to the developer community. I find that although though the intention is good, and are in actual practice used in exactly the same way as their one-letter counterparts. In other words, I really don’t believe that there is any semantic difference whatsoever between and or between and , and in the case of italics, in some cases are actually used opposite of what the tag is meant for. For instance people might want to italicize a photo credit, so they use thinking it has more semantic value. But are they really trying to emphasize the photo credit? Usually they’re trying to make that text appear “lighter”, in other words to differentiate it from other nearby text without adding the appearance of additional importance. They are in fact de-emphasizing the snippet of text, not emphasizing it.

Really the question of what holds greater or lesser semantic weight is a red herring, in my opinion. When encountering some text that a web developer would like rendered in italics, the question shouldn’t be between and , but rather whether there is some other even more appropriate markup structure they should be using.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 21:26:33 +0000

I thought it was a simple semantic argument: “How does a text-reader pronounce bold?”

Which is sort of the same thing you said, but represented in a way that doesn’t need as many examples of what "structural" really means.

By: Justin Perkins

Justin Perkins — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 19:37:09 +0000

Well it looks better now :)

By: Jason Beaird

Jason Beaird — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 19:21:28 +0000

I think I actually geek’d out sometime during the 6th grade. What happened above (and in my feed) was a missing closing tag that somehow caused Movable Type to wrap this whole entry in a
tag. I never noticed it because for some reason my front page, which pulls the text from the db, looked normal.

By: Justin Perkins

Justin Perkins — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 18:03:25 +0000

I thought there was something wrong with your feed, but alas, there is not. You’re just geekin’ out.