[thelist] Style sheet problem!

the <b> and  <i> tags aer holdovers for formatting text at the visual
browser level.

 they gave us methods to  emphasize certain parts of the text in our pages.
in terms of display they were quick and dirty formating tricks/options.

they are now attributes available to the style sheet for Visual
presentation.

the css for an <a href> is shown with the type being set to bold and Italic.

A {
   font-style : italic;
   font-weight : bold;
   font-size : small;
   font-family : verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
   color : blue;
   text-decoration : none;
}

this sets the hyperlinks bold to allow you to emphasize the hyperlink
relationships  in your page in the Visual sense.

with the coming of text to speech readers, the <strong> tag changes the
volume of the text in the tag.
the <em> changes the pitch of the text.

this is explained in the W3C Aural Style Sheet docs, at the W3C site.

in terms of aural presentation the <strong> and <em> tags gives authors the
ability to emphasize text in situations requiring it.

you can produce documents using
Headings
    Sub heading
        paragraphs.
which are text to speech convertable without any further thought.
document structuring and authoring styles will determine the use of these
elements.

this begs the questions of presentation vs content.

in writing for the web do you use the AP news style,
i.e. conclusion first and support for the conclusion in the remainder of the
paragraph?

or paragraph with the conclusion at the end?

or a style containing emphasis in the middle of the paragraph?

these are choices made at the authoring level.

the strong and em tags give you accessibility options beyond the visual
universe.