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iambic9 - 9:11 am on Dec 1, 2009 (gmt 0)


Consider the tone in the following examples:

– Serving XHTML as text/html is completely pointless.

– Serving XHTML as text/html is completely pointless.

There is a difference, and it is subtle. I would argue that <strong> and <b> are semantically the same, <em> and <i> are not.

<em> is for emphasis, a font could be bolded, perhaps enlarged to represent shouting, coloured red for anger, coloured blue for cold et cetera. There are many ways in which you may need to emphasise type, and depending how you do it, it will have a different semantic meaning, and without downloading and analysing the style sheet a search engine would not be wise to make too many judgements regarding the relevance of an <em>emphasised</em> word or paragraph.

Since <b> and <strong> are purely a typographic emphasis, I would suggest that one of them be depreciated. (From a semantic stand point, strong should be the one to go, since bold is bold and the function of <strong> can be fulfilled with <em>)

<i> Represents italics, which is exactly what it should be used for. From Wikipedia:

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§ With regards to the whole (x)html thing, I code using strict xhtml, and send it as text/html. I like the well formedness that xml brings to html. I like to close my tags and I like to write lower case. I also like the little x too. I know it's wrong. I am also a little embarrassed when I serve it up as text/html. I find the idea of content negotiation for the purpose of sending my mash as application/xhtml+xml a little silly too. It's a mess, and a bad habit. I am looking forward to adopting HTML5 and moving on, until I do, I am going to have to stick with writing malformed HTML, it's not right – but it works ;p


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