What's the difference between and , and ?

Answer 1

I use both <strong> and <b>, actually, for exactly the reasons mentioned in this thread of responses. There are times when bold-facing some text simply looks better, but it isn't, necessarily, semantically more important than the rest of the sentence. Here's an example from a page I'm working on right now:

"Retrieves <strong>all</strong> books about <b>lacrosse</b>."

In that sentence, the word "all" is very important, and "lacrosse" less so--I merely wanted it bold because it represents a search term, so I wanted some visual separation. If you're viewing the page with a screen reader, I really don't think it needs to go out of the way to emphasize the word "lacrosse".

I would tend to imagine that most web developers use one of the other, but both are fine--<b> is most definitely not deprecated, as some people have claimed. For me, it's just a fine line between visual appeal and meaning.

Answer 2

For text bold using <b> tag

For text important using <strong> tag

For text italic style using <i> tag

For emphasized text using <em> tag

Answer 3

<strong> and <em> add extra semantic meaning to your document. It just so happens that they also give a bold and italic style to your text.

You could of course override their styling with CSS.

<b> and <i> on the other hand only apply font styling and should no longer be used. (Because you're supposed to format with CSS, and if the text was actually important then you would probably make it "strong" or "emphasised" anyway!)

Hope that makes sense.

Answer 4

You should generally try to avoid <b> and <i>. They were introduced for layouting the page (changing the way how it looks) in early HMTL versions prior to the creation of CSS, like the meanwhile removed font tag, and were mainly kept for backward compatibility and because some forums allow inline HTML and that's an easy way to change the look of text (like BBCode using [i], you can use <i> and so on).

Since the creation of CSS, layouting is actually nothing that should be done in HTML anymore, that's why CSS has been created in the first place (HTML == Structure, CSS == Layout). These tags may as well vanish in the future, after all you can just use CSS and span tags to make text bold/italic if you need a "meaningless" font variation. HTML 5 still allows them but declares that marking text that way has no meaning.

<em> and <strong> on the other hand only says that something is "emphasized" or "strongly emphasized", it leaves it completely open to the browser how to render it. Most browsers will render em as italic and strong as bold as the standard suggests by default, but they are not forced to do that (they may use different colors, font sizes, fonts, whatever). You can use CSS to change the behavior the way you desire. You can make em bold if you like and strong bold and red, for example.

Answer 5

Here's a summary of definitions together with suggested usage:

<b> ...a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian purposes without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of an alternate voice or mood, such as key words in a document abstract, product names in a review, actionable words in interactive text-driven software, or an article lede.

<strong> ...now represents importance rather than strong emphasis.

<i> ...a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts.

<em> ...indicates emphasis.

(These are all direct quotes from W3C sources, with my emphasis added. See: https://rawgithub.com/whatwg/html-differences/master/Overview.html#changed-elements and http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1 for the originals)

Answer 6

They have the same effect on normal web browser rendering engines, but there is a fundamental difference between them.

As the author writes in a discussion list post:

Think of three different situations:

• web browsers
• blind people
• mobile phones

"Bold" is a style - when you say "bold a word", people basically know that it means to add more, let's say "ink", around the letters until they stand out more amongst the rest of the letters.

That, unfortunately, means nothing to a blind person. On mobile phones and other PDAs, text is already bold because screen resolution is very small. You can't bold a bold without screwing something up.

<b> is a style - we know what "bold" is supposed to look like.

<strong> however is an indication of how something should be understood. "Strong" could (and often does) mean "bold" in a browser, but it could also mean a lower tone for a speaking program like Jaws (for blind people) or be represented by an underline (since you can't bold a bold) on a Palm Pilot.

HTML was never meant to be about styles. Do some searches for "Tim Berners-Lee" and "the semantic web." <strong> is semantic—it describes the text it surrounds (e.g., "this text should be stronger than the rest of the text you've displayed") as opposed to describing how the text it surrounds should be displayed (e.g., "this text should be bold").