Let’s all make some semantic improvements today. Substitute the B element with STRONG and do likewise for I and EM. Replace your tables with semantic markup instead of the other way around.
In related news, I was invited by Microsoft to join the Internet Explorer Quality Assurance team. I can start right after my exams.
The above was a joke, for all the people that didn’t catch the date. If I ever make another joke it will be one that fewer people take for granted :-)
Simply replacing <b> by <strong> is not the right thing to do! In the most used browsers they look the same, but many times people use <b> to put emphasis on a word, so <em> might be better suited. The right advise would be to review the semantic meaning of your code.
<naive>Congratulations! ;-)</naive>
Microsoft has an Internet Explorer Quality Assurance team? ;-)
April Fools!
Doug, that actually was the first thing that surprised me :P
Well done, and say; "Hello" to Bill from me. ;-)
Congrats on being signed up for the IE QA team. I can't think of anyone better suited to this role. I hope you're being paid!
Also, i doesn't automatically translate to em. It might require a cite... The general ideas behind the post are good -- semantic markup
Congratulations, good start in this new month :*)
Not all <i> and <b> are bad. My company sells a product called MemberDirect. It turns out that the italicized "Direct" is a requirement. In this case its only correct to use a <i>; its italicized, not emphasized. <em> would be semanitcally incorrect; it would imply that the Direct is emphasized, but that's not true.
Huh. I just tried to preview this and your comment code forbids the use of <i> which means that I have to use what is, in this case, semantically incorrect markup.
How's that for irony?
Also the W3C has announced it will deprecate punctuation with effect from xhtml2 as it is too presentational and doesn't really mean anything so it may be worthwhile removing any full stops commas apostrophes colons and semi colons at the same time to make your pages even more semantic
If you want to italicise your text, but aren't emphasising anything in particular, then just use a styled span or cite. Emphasis tags require UAs to emphasise the content, something which Italic tags don't do. Moreoever, em tags are not necessitated to italicise, it's just that some UAs happen to interpret them that way.
I was invited by Microsoft to join the Internet Explorer Quality Assurance team.
Can you tell us more about what that means?
I truly hope the QA thing isn't a joke!
However, you probably would give it more attention if you didn't joke...
Okay, you had me with the semantics thing ("Surely he isn't condoning mindless semantics?!"), then the second paragraph was the tip-off. ;-)
I see a few other people have forgotten the date though. :-p
I didn't suspect jokes on this blog
Maybe we should all mail Microsoft about this joke actually being a rather good idea!
Anne, it's too late now! We're getting you on that team. If there's no team we'll have to create that too...
Is this why there are no famous dutch comedians? April Fools jokes are supposed to be silly not sensible!
If you want to italicise your text, but aren't emphasising anything in particular, then just use a styled span or cite.
Uh, what? How is a styled span any better than an i, or the latter any worse than the former? Answer: it’s not, both are precisely the same thing, they have exactly zero semantics.
But cite does have semantics, so employing it for presentation clearly is abuse.
This is surely an april's fool, isn't it? :D
For those who did not get it: B != STRONG and I != EM.
Semantics? What do standards have to say on that?
If (small) “emphasis” means “italicising”, hm, I'm lost. :(
The premise of just plainly replacing <b> with <strong> never seemed right to me. As pointed out by others above they mean different things.
Content is always scanned first and never read first. Print based design always needed to set a bold or alternate typeface to make a word scannable for the reader. The word is selected based on an appeal and not it's contextual meaning. Designers always struggle with this when typesetting.
Web based work doesn't suffer from this. Because it can do both with either <b> or <strong>.
I never use bold because i allways make that the important words are links
How is a styled span any better than an i.
Aristotle, you're implying that I said span tags are more semantic than italic ones but if you re-read my post I said nothing of the kind.
All I was stating was that there was no difference between the two methods, save that the proper approach to italicise text is stylising it using CSS, thereby avoiding deprecated tags such as bold and italics. These are not semantic because they confer no meaning on the document, only being used to format their containing elements. The same is true of spans, though not cites which denote more than just look-and-feel.
Elements B and I are not deprecated... I do not like them either, however ;)
Nor should they be deprecated. Many users may find no application for them, but many others would. For example, in a citation of a book, the book name should be in italics, and an em tag would be completely inappropriate.
Tim: although it could be argued that you mark up the book name semantically, use some meanginful element inside a cite element with class="book". Then you italicize the name in the stylesheet.
jbot: you can certainly style your i elements in your stylesheet. Any unsemantic tag is as good as any other, so when you have a lot of repetition, b or i may even be preferrable over span because the markup is shorter overall.
In other words, replace a simple italics tag with a bunch of markup? I don't think so.