Selecting a word, making it "bold", looking at the code, seeing <b> word.. </b>.
Shouldn't it be <strong></strong> ?
Shouldn't it be <strong></strong> ?
Semantic HTML + CSS can be taken too far, but having separate layers gives you a lot more flexibility than presentational HTML alone, which tends to be very brittle.
Meanwhile, the whole concept of using italics for emphasis is a Western idea. CJK languages, for example, don't use italics for emphasis, and most of their italic fonts actually look terrible on screen.
In HTML5, <i> and <b> now have the deliberately vague semantic definitions of "alternate voice" and "stylistically offset" – this could cover emphasis, book/film names, key words, foreign phrases, etc. Incorrect use of the more specific semantic tags (eg. generating <em> when the user sets a film title to "italic") is worse than a lack of semantic detail.
HTML5 was designed with the understanding that not all web content can be authored by someone who knows the correct use of semantic HTML tags like <cite>, <em>, <strong>, <mark>, etc. Application-level copy can use those tags, but a rich text editor (for normal people) can't know which one is appropriate, so it should always default to the vague ones, <b> and <i>.