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Comment by AlunAlun | Hacker News Reader

To take a simple example, HTML was originally a pure markup language, so if you wanted to make text bold you would do it like this; simple, declaritive

But then it was decided that there was no semantic purpose to the tag, so it became this.

Now, with the ubiquity of js, it's more like this (along with something like getElementById("bold-text").setAttribute("style", "font-weight:bold") in the background).

It should be pointed out that things come full-circle: frameworks like Bootstrap define the tag which, via similar JS to above, all-but-duplicate the functionality of the original tag. I think the OP's point though is that you have to add a JS framework to do this.

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What? is a tag defined in the HTML standard (with a bold default-styling in browsers). There is absolutely no need for frameworks to do anything to it, especially not with JS.

vs vs have different semantic meaning, and all have valid uses in modern HTML.

I think this is a bit confused? bold text would be appropriate for a span of text that is to be set in bold for no semantically-relevant reason, otherwise you would use something like this (please read carefully!), and then use CSS to style the "important" class as bold. The tag has actually been revived, but it is reserved for a span of text that is to be clearly set apart from its surroundings for some semantic reason unrelated to emphasis, importance or anything that's covered by other HTML tags or features.

is not invalid from a literalist perspective. It will still be bold.

Semantic markup is nice, but 'div/span soup' is still very popular and isn't technically incorrect.

Have you looked at the linked post? It creates a powerful mechanism for introducing new declarative elements. And gasp it uses JavaScript.

   import Ghost from "../components/Ghost"; 
   <Ghost size={80}>Thanks for reading!</Ghost>

I think you're overlooking CSS as well, which is a very nice declarative way that maintains semantics and makes styling more adjustable.

this and .bold-text {font-weight: 600;}

strong has been around for a long time.

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