Comments on: A reconsideration—in defence of and (or: people fear what they don’t understand)

By: Andrew Johns

Andrew Johns — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:29:39 +0000

My take on it, coming from a CSS + Accessibility + General Semantics and Standards view, regardless of CURRENT level of screenreaders to accurately represent the difference – is that if we’re saying that some text should be made bold or italic purely for presentational reasons, then the Level A requirement in WCAG 2.0, “1.3.1 Info and Relationships: Information, structure, and relationships conveyed through presentation can be programmatically determined or are available in text. ” dictates that the i and b tags should be dropped in favour of using css, regardless of the extra amount of code that might be required to produce the same effect, because that’s what is required to be “valid” by recommended practices. After all, how often would this be an issue? In most cases the requirement for styling will come from the need for emphasis.

However, the problem with this view is whether you consider i and b to be a presentational effect or whether it is conveying information that is different to emphasis (em or strong). if it’s conveying any form of information then it becomes semantic rather than presentation, and is therefore acceptable.

The argument that it is widely used and so should be kept in is rubbish, because fonts were widely used and they’ve been deprecated, as is the U tag, etc. It’s a bit of dilemma really.

By: John Faulds

John Faulds — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:10:16 +0000

Ships’ names and latin words, such as the names of species, might also be good examples of text which is commonly italicised, but the italics don’t denote emphasis.

Just to expand on this, and on the point made earlier about using cite for titles: you can mention a title without necessarily citing it, e.g. I’ve just finished reading The Great Gatsby. In my opinion, as with ships’ names and latin names, is the appropriate tag to use in this situation, and it’s one I’ve used in the past (except as Jim points out when a CMS WYSIWYG editor will for insert for ).

I’ve never quite found a use for though as I can’t think where you would want something to be bold but not emphasised (I don’t really agree with the examples that the HTML5 spec puts forward).

By: Diptanshu

Diptanshu — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:23:27 +0000

Tonal aspects aside, ‘b’ and ‘i’ tags offer the same kind of presentation. Why have …class=’bold’ etc when the simple b can also be stylized?

IMO, strong and em tags are not necessary. Doesn’t make a difference when we have to read the text anyway; it will have the emphasis anyway.

By: Jim O'Donnell

Jim O'Donnell — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:27:03 +0000

Ships’ names and latin words, such as the names of species, might also be good examples of text which is commonly italicised, but the italics don’t denote emphasis. There’s no specific tag for those in HTML ( maybe?) which leaves or

The B and I buttons on some WYSIWYG editors insert strong and em tags into HTML. In that case, strong and em don’t indicate text emphasis – they’ve replaced b & i for people who want a semantically neutral equivalent to the terms ‘bold’ and ‘italic’.

By: CSS Brigit | A reconsideration—in defence of bold and italice

CSS Brigit | A reconsideration—in defence of bold and italice — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:57:50 +0000
A reconsideration—in defence of bold and italice... A post covering the availability and usability of the demonised HTML elements b and i. ...

By: jose

jose — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:45:07 +0000

I would like to make a correction:
“Using a span with a class for every each of the cases increases code and load time”
should be : “increases code and decreases load time”

The big tag though doesn’t have semantic meaning, but th word itself reflects the state of the element for me…there is no conclusion. Presentational tags are not recomended in favor of css.

By: jose

jose — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:34:43 +0000

Interesting article.Tags like b, i, pre, small, sub, sup, tt, big are elements grouped in xhtml presentational module.They are valid, non-deprecated, with lack of semantics, affecting only the visual part of the web.There is just one issue that contradicts the use of them.It’s about separating structure, style and behaviour….and all of theese tags can be replaced with a css property. Then why does theese tags still exist in xhtml specs?????Anyway i tend to use b and i instead of span element for rounded corners because they are shorter than span(just 1 letter) and sometimes I use big for tagging prices with big font-size.They don’t have semantics so I could use them for anything I want(but not as replacement for semantic tags)…..Using a span with a class for every each of the cases increases code and load time, but it’s more correct, because we leave style out of structure.So we have to choose:less code, faster load, structure mixed with presentation or more code, slower load(depends of the number of uses), correct separation of structure and style….

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:39:11 +0000

Really good article and I think it highlights a problem where a lot of developers are just blindly following some guide that they read on a website that said ‘ and tags are bad’ or ‘don’t use tables use div tags instead’, without really understanding the reasons why. This leads to common misuse/overuse of those tags (I’ve seen so many websites where tabular data has been laid out with div tags) which, to me, is just as bad as the problem they were trying to get away from in the first place.

Having said that, I’m still not a fan of using and , having markup that denotes nothing but style just doesn’t feel quite right to me, after all markup is just supposed to be about semantics. Personally I’d much rather see than to boldify a company’s name for branding requirements. At some point in the future the company’s branding may change and they might drop the boldifying (err..??) requirement, if you used you’re either going to have to replace all instances of around the company name within your markup OR be a bit rubbish and style all of your ’s as font-weight: normal, not very nice at all.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:09:12 +0000

Make that the bold tag. I don’t know what escaping to use in this box.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:08:45 +0000

I run a website that posts monthly journal entries of several people. One of them likes to format his in what he calls the “comic strip fashion.” Basically this means that the first time a new person or place is mentioned in his journal, he wants it bold. For me this is the perfect use of the b tag.