> The b and i elements are widely used — it is better to give them good default rendering for various media including aural than to try to ban them.
“Some sites”… “widely used”… yeah, because that’s the purpose of those tags. To underline, bold, italic, respectively. This isn’t some concession we should be giving to legacy user agents, it’s the whole original stated purpose of the tags. Any attempt to retcon them to mean other stuff in the name of (something something) “media independence” or some such academic nonsense, is totally backwards.
I know that large parts of this article agree with me, but I still get angry that HTML took this purist direction to make huge swaths of markup useless in the name of semantic/display split that no user actually asked for. When I first read about the em tag and how it is the new way to do what the i tag used to do, I knew the whole thing had already been driven off a cliff.