Thats not true. In the most recent XHTML, all of those are still valid.Everah wrote:From what I've read at w3c, <b> is being depricated along with <i> and <u>. <strong> is now favored in place of <b>, <em> is now used in place of <i> and <u> is being thrown out altogether in favor off CSS underlining. Oh well, I haven't used the old ones for a while (Hey, I did a good thing!, Yippee!).
People get confused about where its going because there is a *context* choice in when you are supposed to use one over the other. Its not a simple "always/never" rule, which makes it harder.
This blog entry: http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2004/05/02/b-and-i does a great job explaining the differences, and when/why you'd use one over the other.
In a nutshell, <b>, and <i> are styling elements. It says "Make my text look a certain way". Strong and emphasis however, says "These elements have a different meaning from the rest of the text". They do happen to have the same default style in most browsers, which is why they seem to be the same until you think about what they 'mean'. Imagine that both had stylesheet rules which made them look like other text, so the only difference was in the sourcecode. Then which has meaning in the context you are using it?
<b> means make this look bold. If its not being made bold, it has no meaning. Strong, on the other hand, says this is a point I would like to have stand out. There is definitely a difference in those two messages, yes?
Thats what semantic html is about - giving better meaning to your code, to help parsing engines and programmers understand it. (As a side benefit, it also usually improves your site layout).
Or put another way, <b> and <i> are not evil - they are just commonly misused.