Purple_Martin - 10:10 pm on Nov 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

But I thought <i> and <b> were deprecated.

No, they're not. They are still valid and still have a purpose.

Later versions of some editors (e.g. Dreamweaver and Homesite) use <em> and <strong> by default when you highlight some text and press CTRL+I or CTRL+B, which gives the misleading impression that <i> and <b> have been replaced by <em> and <strong>. This is not true: they have not been replaced, they do different things and should therefore be used differently. The differences have already been well explained throughout this topic.