In theory, more information would be easier for a language model to extract meaning from though.
I feel so disappointed with all the hand-waviness I'm almost considering using the <big> tag for big text. The only thing stopping me is that I don't know if I'll get a penalty somewhere for using a deprecated tag.
Also, underline doesn't work for vertically oriented scripts, and is usually just another way to emphasize, which is why it was moved to styling instead.
Why would someone writing English have to think about how bold text looks like in Japanese? That makes no sense.
Even for accessibility it makes no sense. As far as I know, screen readers don't even announce bold/italic/em/strong or them differently. And if they announced, I'd expect any italic text I ever write to be read out loud as "in italics..." not "in emphasis..."
I genuinely can not understand the thought process that went into creating these tags. It's like they completely ignored the idea that text as a medium has its own layer of semantics and tried to skip over it. But this is just my personal opinion. In the end the objective facts are that <em> and <strong> don't really do anything in the real world besides wasting more bytes than <i> and <b>, so there's exactly zero benefits in using them.
I really wish someone would prove me wrong, though, hence this thread.
Imagine if I had a markup language for voice synthesis. If I typed a word, the computer would say out loud that word. But I had tags like <whisper> and <yell> to change the volume of the computer voice, and <pausedly> and <quickly> to change its speed. These tags make no sense in the text medium, and yet their semantics are self-evident in speech.
If authors had a way to mark up how their text should be voiced, perhaps they would mark them so. Who wouldn't love a real <sarcasm> tag for sarcastically voiced text? But HTML went the opposite way. Instead of providing more tools to let authors express themselves, they took every format of expression and dumped it in a single label.
Of all the opinions someone could hold strongly, that's certainly one of them.
No, I only care about the way I write text. If I'm writing an article and I want to make text bold, I don't want to waste my time having to come up with a deeper explanation about WHY should the text be bold. That's an obstacle in the creative process. I want bold text. Period. I don't want <em> or <strong>, and I don't want a "bring attention to" element". I want bold.
Can you say that EVERY SINGLE TIME I want bold text that will match the semantics of <strong>? If that's true, then it shouldn't be called <strong>, it should be called <bold>. If that's not true, then one day I'll mark something as <strong> because I want bold text and it will be the incorrect tag for that text because of a semantic mismatch. In that case, what should I do? Should I just use <span style="text-weight: bold"> or <span class="bold"> for my bold text? Are you telling me that every time I want bold text I'll have to make the conscious choice of deciding whether I should use a <strong> tag or a <span> tag? Can you imagine the nightmare of making this work in a CMS like Wordpress? It would be much easier to just never use <strong> at all and just use <span> for bold every time.
If the only way to make sure you're using the semantics correctly is to just never use the tag at all, I say we just give up on this <strong> nonsense and use the <b> tag which matches the semantics of what the person writing the text wants to convey.
When I read the above, I thought: you want bold, because you want to highlight a word. Because highlighting a word is a widely recognized way to bring attention to it. And so making it bold is just a tool, it's secondary to the actual goal.
I suspect you might not agree with that, but could you point me to the part where I got it wrong from your perspective?
Trying to come up with an universal reason for why bold is bold is like trying to come up with an universal formula to explain why any number 42 is 42. You wouldn't say every 42 came from 40 + 2 just because 40 + 2 equals 42, because some 42's come from 44 - 2 and others come from 6 times 7. Similarly, there is no universal reason for bold to be bold except for the fact that it is bold and that is it.
You say bold is used for highlighting. What would you say italic is used for then? And underline? All caps? Small caps? Title case? Colored text? A yellow background on the text? There are countless ways to highlight text.
Do you have the courage to style <strong> as ANYTHING but bold or <em> as anything but italic? (oblique doesn't count!)
No, you do not.
Because in your heart you know. The writer CHOSE bold. He CHOSE italic.
He had all these "highlight" tools in front of him, like a palette of colors, and he specifically and unambiguously picked bold. You can't ever change the meaning of bold to anything but bold, regardless of whether you use <b> as bold or <strong> as bold, because bold is an inseparable part of the content now.
If you changed <strong> to a non-bold red color text, it would change the typographic semantics of everything ever written with <strong>.
So in my view, it's not something abstract like highlight, it's literally bold, in its pure concrete form, because the author had a healthy vision, he spoke a Latin language, and he wanted his text to have bold letters.
I mean, just look at Wordpress and WYSIWYG editors. Nobody in sane mind would write "emphasis" and "important" text unstyled and put those buttons in the editor, because no author would EVER click on them. No author WANTS to mark emphasis or important text. Authors click the B button and the I button because they want bold and italic.
Can you imagine someone looking up Markdown's or restructured text's to find out how to mark "emphasis"? Nobody is writing text or *text* or _text_ or __text__ because they want emphasis. They're looking up which one of these characters generates BOLD text.
What the author means is BOLD. Means. As in meaning, semantics. It makes no sense to second guess what they really mean and change those semantics to emphasis/importance just because you think those are human-language/medium-agnostic and thus more portable. When you change <b> to <strong> what you're doing has a name: semantic bleaching, which happens when a word that had concrete meaning loses its meaning when it starts functioning in a more abstract (grammatical) way. Feels like the opposite of what anyone would want!
And then IMHO it would be incorrect to use <strong>.
As for the difference between <strong> and <em>, they way I understand it is:
> <strong>Hacker News</strong> is <em>the</em> site.
Basically one highlights a term (say, it could be then looked up somewhere), and the other adds spoken emphasis--in the above sentence, HN is not some site, it's THE site we talked about before.
The standard way of rendering (or priting) words with such semantic meaning is respectively bold and italics. But if you ask me it could also be underline and uppercase (respectively).
And if you render the page not to a visual medium but to sound (screen readers), then you give the screen reader a chance to treat (and read) those words differently.
So, why couldn't they do that with <b> and <i>?
Every person with healthy vision writing a Latin language is using <strong> as bold, and most of them don't even realize it because it's hidden behind GUIs that show a B (bold) button which generates <strong> code. If you make this an issue in their tracker they will just tell you <strong> is more semantic and <b> won't be used.
Regardless of what the semantics of <strong> should have been, in practice you just made <b> with a longer name. In other words, there is no reason to use or have made <strong>, since the end result was just <b> again. Screen readers could have just done what they do with <strong> (i.e. nothing) with <b> and saved us all a lot of trouble.
I can say that almost every single time someone wants bold text now it will be a <strong> tag, even if the semantics are wrong.
So waitasecond, <strong> was created, airheaded developers of WYSIWYG plugins messed it up, and that retroactively means there is no reason for it to have ever been created? That's a real pretzel you're twisting.
How about: "Programmers of WYSIWYG widgets should just stop messing things up, i.e. sabotaging the efforts of the blind and other people who use/develop screenreaders—so we can finally achieve the accessibility wins that <strong> was created to solve"?
> Screen readers could have just done what they do with <strong>
No, they can't. Not in the sense of, "There's a problem that exists. We want to solve it." Your proposal is to ignore the problem and do nothing. You can apply that approach to anything. (Heck, why even have screenreaders at all? People who are blind or dyslexic are shut out from the Web? Let's just do nothing.)
> ...and saved us all a lot of trouble
Saved who a lot of trouble? What trouble?
Your company then decides that Japanese text should be supported. Now your code needs to output italics / underlines for English, or emphasis dots / enlarged text / font change in Japanese. You dutifully add the style sheet shenanigans and special case HTML generator code to do this.
Next, your company wants to support Hindi. So now your code needs to support three different ways to render the text depending on intent and language - with all the maintenance headache this entails.
... and so on.
Soon enough you start to think "This is crazy! I'll just make some style classes for things that need emphasizing, and then put the presentation stuff in the style sheets. That way I can greatly simplify things!"
And now you've invented em and strong.
The whole reason why style sheets were invented was to separate intent from presentation. The i and b tags in HTML are a classic example of engineering failure due to the assumption that they knew enough about a subject outside of their wheelhouse, and as a result failed to consult the experts (in this case, typesetters). Once the experts weighed in, the i and b tags were (rightly) deprecated.
Here's a random article about the upcoming EU regulations: https://www.siteimprove.com/glossary/eu-web-accessibility-di... - they also have a site checker that performs an automated accessibility scan.
>Mainstream screen readers currently treat B/I tags identically to STRONG/EM tags. That is, they are ignored unless a user specifies that they be indicated. Some users report that announcing changes can be distracting.
As for it not being critical due to inconsistent screen reader support--it sounds like a chicken and egg problem. If developers don't use those tags consistently, then people using screen readers have hard time with them, and so screen readers adjust.
In any case, if it doesn't hurt but can potentially help, I personally prefer to use semantic tags to convey the meaning and visual styles for pure visual effects.