[thelist] Bold vs. Strong

Keith Dahlby dahlbyk at softhome.net
Wed Aug 13 00:59:31 CDT 2003


><b> doesn't impart semantic meaning, only visual style... it's also a
>much shorter element than <span class="bold"> (or whatever class name
>you choose to assign)... and <b> is still a valid tag in HTML 4.01
>(go ahead, use this to start the XHTML debate)...

To preemptively ward off any HTML/XHTML debate, the b and i elements are 
indeed valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. I wouldn't expect to see them in XHTML 2.0, 
but the img element will probably disappear too...RIP.

>personally, i'd stick with the <b>... it may prove to be easier to
>style/destyle, search and replace, and just see when visually
>scanning code...

FWIW, I agree that for text with no semantic significance, any of the 
inline 'fontstyle' elements [1] (tt, i, b, big, small) can, maybe even 
should be used in place of defining a bold/italic/big class to achieve the 
same end. Basically, <b> and <span class="bold"> mean exactly the same 
thing, so you might as well save 12 bytes and the class declaration.

Cheers ~ K

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/dtds.html#dtdentry_xhtml1-strict.dtd_fontstyle



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