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Nope, you're wrong. is actually still being used to differentiate between . is used for accessibility reasons (making the words enunciate with emphasis, while just makes the words bold by default). If you want to bold a part of the sentence without having emphasis, you'll need to use .

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I'd use for making something bold. Because that's a styling thing, so I use a style sheet.

I could even use if I wanted to emphasize something without making it bold. Because that has a functional purpose with screen readers, and isn't strictly a styling thing.

What's the difference between and .

Em is for emphasis.

is for intonational emphasis, the way you'd give a little extra stress on a word when you are speaking. is an indicator of importance, and may not correspond to intonational emphasis in spoken language.

As for the older tags, they were deprecated in XHTML, but have been redeemed in HTML 5. is used for elements that are traditionally set it italics but are neither emphasized nor citations. Often that will be foreign words (where one ought to use a lang attribute). Similarly is used to indicate elements that are traditionally set in bold face, but which do not indicate importance (as headings or in running text would do). Both are better than the semantically-meaningless tag, and vastly better than misusing the , <cite> and tags for their presentation effects.

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