Strong Emphisis vs. Bold Italic

2007-12-01T17:20:00.001-08:00

All though I have been doing web design and development for a short few years, I have never actually known what the point was for swapping and for and . I knew it was best practice, but never really bothered to look up and understand why I made this switch. I finally got the chance to research why the and tags are preferable and also if there were suitable situations for the use of the and tags in XHTML documents.

Since I knew it had something to do with accessibility, this is where I started from.

After reading the chapter on ", AND OTHER PHRASE ELEMENTS" in Web Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook and a few blogs I discovered it basically comes down to Presentation vs. Structure.

The tags and have no meaning other than just rendering text as bold or italic. So these are just presentational tags.

and on the other hand, give extra meaning to the text. This means that when a screen reader is being used it can change it's pitch, rate or volume accordingly when these tags are used.

is normal rendered by most browsers as bold text and is normally rendered as italic text. If you wanted emphasized text to be displayed as both bold and italic, one of the best solutions is to create a class in your tag and set the font weight to bold in the CSS for that class. There are other ways to solve this, but is the interest of keeping mark-up to a minimum, I think this is the most effective solution.

CSS3 – What is supported today?

2007-12-01T07:36:00.000-08:00

Coming soon...

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Strong Emphisis vs. Bold Italic

CSS3 – What is supported today?