IanKelley - 8:50 pm on Nov 30, 2009 (gmt 0)

For example, assume that you are "listening" to the page rather than viewing it. What does <b> mean? It means "bold". Ok, so what does that mean semantically when that section gets read? Absolutely nothing. "Bold" describes presentation, not content. On the other hand, if it was marked up with <strong>, that has semantic meaning, which can be interpreted to be audibly different than the surrounding text. The same holds true with regards to <i> and <em>. <i> meaning "italicized" has no semantic value, but <em> has a semantic meaning of "emphasis".

From my perspective it's the use of a language defines the semantics.

People use the <b> tag to mean text that stands out from other text. This text is louder so it certainly qualifies under your "listening" test.

This has been the consensus interpretation of bold text for 100's of years. People have always "heard" it louder.

Whereas <strong> is a well meaning attempt to create a semantic tag that never caught on. It now universally means <b> to every browser because that is what people already semantically understood strong emphasis to mean.

<strong> is an alias for <b> that uses almost 3 times the bytes.