What s the difference between b and strong i and em

Question

What s the difference between  lt b gt  and  lt strong gt    lt i gt  and  lt em gt  in HTML XHTML  When should you use each

User · Answer

lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are both related to style  whereas  lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  are semantic  In HTML 4  the first are classified as font style elements  and the latter as phrase elements   As you indicated correctly   lt i gt  and  lt em gt  are often considered similar  because browsers often render both in italics  But according to the specifications   lt em gt  indicates emphasis and  lt strong gt  indicates stronger emphasis  which is quite clear  but often misinterpreted  On the other hand  the distinction between when to use  lt i gt  or  lt b gt  is really a matter of style

User · Answer

For  text  bold  using   lt b gt   tag  For  text  important  using   lt strong gt   tag  For  text  italic  style  using   lt i gt   tag  For   emphasized text using   lt em gt   tag

User · Answer

lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  consume more bandwidth than  lt i gt  and  lt b gt    They also require more typing  if not auto-generated    They also clutter the editor screen with more text  I seem to recall that programmers like smaller source files if they are the same   And let s be real  they are the same  Yes  there are  technical    lt i gt cough lt  i gt   ahem  excuse me  differences  but that s mostly phony to begin with    With any of the above tags  you can use style sheets to customize how they appear to however you want if you need them to appear different than their defaults renderings

User · Answer

As the others have stated  the difference is that  lt b gt  and  lt i gt  hardcode font styles  whereas  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  dictate semantic meaning  with the font style  or speaking browser intonation  or what-have-you  to be determined at the time the text is rendered  or spoken    You can think of this as a difference between a  ldquo physical rdquo  font style and a  ldquo logical rdquo  style  if you will   At some later time  you may wish to change the way  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  text are displayed  say  by altering properties in a style sheet to add color and size changes  or even to use different font faces entirely   If you ve used  ldquo logical rdquo  markup instead of hardcoded  ldquo physical rdquo  markup  then you can simply change the display properties in one place each in your style sheet  and then all of the pages that reference that style sheet get changed automatically  without ever having to edit them   Pretty slick  huh   This is also the rationale behind defining sub-styles  referenced using the style  property in text tags  for paragraphs  table cells  header text  captions  etc   and using  lt div gt  tags   You can define physical representation for your logical styles in the style sheet  and the changes are automatically reflected in the web pages that reference that style sheet   Want a different representation for source code   Redefine the font  size  weight  spacing  etc  for your  code  style   If you use XHTML  you can even define your own semantic tags  and your style sheet would do the conversions to physical font styles and layouts for you

User · Answer

They have the same effect  However  XHTML  a cleaner  newer version of HTML  recommends the use of the  lt strong gt  tag  Strong is better because it is easier to read - its meaning is clearer  Additionally   lt strong gt  conveys a meaning - showing the text strongly - while  lt b gt   for bold  conveys a method - bolding the text  With strong  your code still makes sense if you use CSS stylesheets to change what the methods of making the text strong is   The same goes for the difference between  lt i gt  and  lt em gt      Google dixit   http   wiki answers com Q What is the difference between HTML tags b and strong

User · Answer

HTML Formatting Elements   HTML also defines special elements for defining text with a special meaning  HTML uses elements like  lt b  and  lt i  for formatting output  like bold or italic text   HTML Bold and Strong Formatting      The HTML  lt b  element defines bold text  without any extra importance     lt b gt This text is bold lt  b gt       The HTML  lt strong  element defines strong text  with added semantic    strong  importance     lt strong gt This text is strong lt  strong gt    HTML Italic and Emphasized Formatting      The HTML  lt i  element defines italic text  without any extra   importance     lt i gt This text is italic lt  i gt       The HTML  lt em  element defines emphasized text  with added semantic   importance     lt em gt This text is emphasized lt  em gt

User · Answer

As the others have stated  the difference is that  lt b gt  and  lt i gt  hardcode font styles  whereas  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  dictate semantic meaning  with the font style  or speaking browser intonation  or what-have-you  to be determined at the time the text is rendered  or spoken    You can think of this as a difference between a  ldquo physical rdquo  font style and a  ldquo logical rdquo  style  if you will   At some later time  you may wish to change the way  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  text are displayed  say  by altering properties in a style sheet to add color and size changes  or even to use different font faces entirely   If you ve used  ldquo logical rdquo  markup instead of hardcoded  ldquo physical rdquo  markup  then you can simply change the display properties in one place each in your style sheet  and then all of the pages that reference that style sheet get changed automatically  without ever having to edit them   Pretty slick  huh   This is also the rationale behind defining sub-styles  referenced using the style  property in text tags  for paragraphs  table cells  header text  captions  etc   and using  lt div gt  tags   You can define physical representation for your logical styles in the style sheet  and the changes are automatically reflected in the web pages that reference that style sheet   Want a different representation for source code   Redefine the font  size  weight  spacing  etc  for your  code  style   If you use XHTML  you can even define your own semantic tags  and your style sheet would do the conversions to physical font styles and layouts for you

User · Answer

You should generally try to avoid  lt b gt  and  lt i gt   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  lt i gt  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    lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  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

User · Answer

lt b gt  and  lt i gt  should be avoided because they describe the style of the text  Instead  use  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  because that describes the semantics  the meaning  of the text   As with all things in HTML  you should be thinking not about how you want it to look  but what you actually mean  Sure  it might just be bold and italics to you  but not to a screen reader

User · Answer

In HTML Lang  these two tags are used as follows  simple text this is test text normal text    simple text this is important textwith normal text  The major diversity between these two HTML tags is that bold makes text only visually look bold  while strong also symbolism hit the respective text as essential and indicates that it is a clear word or text section  This difference is due to the fact that HTML code differentiates between symbolism and physical visual html tags  While the earlier refer to the meaning of the relevant areas  the latter merely define the optical display in browsers  You can check this from here

User · Answer

lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  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    lt b gt  and  lt i gt  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

User · Answer

We use the  lt strong gt  tag for text which has high priority for SEO purposes like product name  company name etc  while  lt b gt  simple makes it bold   Similarly  we use  lt em gt  for text which has high priority for SEO  while  lt i gt  to make the text simply italic

User · Answer

Use them only if using CSS style classes is for any reason unconvinient or impossible  like blog systems  allow only some tags to use in posts and eventually embedded styles   Another reason is support for very old browsers  some mobile devices   or primitive search engines  that give points for  lt b gt  or  lt strong gt  tags  instead of analysing CSS styles    If you can define CSS styles  use them

User · Answer

While  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are of course more semantically correct  there seem definite legitimate reasons to use the  lt b gt  and  lt i gt  tags for customer-written content    In such content  words or phrases may be bolded or italicized and it is generally  not up to us to analyze the semantic reasoning for such bolding or italicizing    Further  such content may refer to bolded and italicized words and phrases to convey a specific meaning    An example would be an english exam question which instructs a student to replace the bolded word

User · Answer

lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are both related to style  whereas  lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  are semantic  In HTML 4  the first are classified as font style elements  and the latter as phrase elements   As you indicated correctly   lt i gt  and  lt em gt  are often considered similar  because browsers often render both in italics  But according to the specifications   lt em gt  indicates emphasis and  lt strong gt  indicates stronger emphasis  which is quite clear  but often misinterpreted  On the other hand  the distinction between when to use  lt i gt  or  lt b gt  is really a matter of style

User · Answer

I m going to hazard a historical and practical hot take here  Yes  according to specifications   lt strong gt  had a semantic meaning in HTML4 and  lt b gt  had a strictly presentational meaning  Yes  when HTML5 came along  new semantic meaning that was slightly different was introduced for b and i  Yes  the W3C recommends     basically     TL DR  don t use b and i   You should always bear in mind that the content of a b element may not always be bold  and that of an i element may not always be italic  The actual style is dependent on the CSS style definitions  You should also bear in mind that bold and italic may not be the preferred style for content in certain languages  You should not use b and i tags if there is a more descriptive and relevant tag available   BUT  The real world internet has massive loads of existing HTML that is never going to get updated  The real world internet has to account for content generated and copy and pasted between a vast network of software and CMS systems that all have different developer teams and were built in different eras  So if you re writing HTML or building a system that writes HTML for other people     sure     definitely use  lt strong gt  instead of  lt b gt  to mean  quot strongly emphasized quot  because it s more semantically correct  But really  the on-the-ground reality is that the semantic and stylistic meaning of  lt strong gt  and  lt b gt  have merged over time out of necessity  If I m building a CMS that allows any pasting of styled text  I need to plan both for people who are pasting in  lt b gt  and mean  quot strongly emphasized quot  and for people who are pasting in  lt strong gt  and mean  quot make this text bold quot   It might not be  quot right quot   but it s how the real world works at this moment in time  And so  if I m writing a stylesheet for that site  I m probably going to end up writing some styles that look like this  b  strong     font-weight  700           more styles here       i  em     font-style  italic           more styles here       Or  I m going to rely on the browser defaults  which do the same thing as the code above in every modern browser I know of  Or  I might be one of probably millions of sites that use normalize css  which takes care to ensure that b and strong are treated the same  There s such a massive ocean of HTML out there in the world already that works off of this expectation  I just can t imagine that b will EVER be depreciated in favor of strong or that browsers will ever start displaying them differently by default  So that s it  That s my hot take on semantics  history and the real world  Are b i and strong em the same  No  Will they probably both exist and be treated as identical in almost every situation until the collapse of modern civilization  I think  yes

User · Answer

I use both  lt strong gt  and  lt b gt   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  lt strong gt all lt  strong gt  books about  lt b gt lacrosse lt  b gt     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-- lt b gt  is most definitely not deprecated  as some people have claimed  For me  it s just a fine line between visual appeal and meaning

User · Answer

As others have said  lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are explicit  i e   make this text bold    whereas  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are semantic  i e   this text should be emphasised     In the context of a modern web-browser  it s difficult to see the difference  they both appear to produce the same result  right    but think about screen readers for the visually impaired  If a screen-reader came across an  lt i gt  tag  it wouldn t know what to do  But if it comes across a  lt em gt  tag  it knows that whatever is within should be emphasised to the listener  And therein you get the practical difference

User · Answer

b or i means you want the text to be rendered as bold or italics  strong or em means you want the text to be rendered in a way that the user understands as  important   The default is to render strong as bold and em as italics  but some other cultures might use a different mapping   Like strings in a program  b and i would be  hard coded  while strong and em would be  localized

User · Answer

lt b gt  and  lt i gt  should be avoided because they describe the style of the text  Instead  use  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  because that describes the semantics  the meaning  of the text   As with all things in HTML  you should be thinking not about how you want it to look  but what you actually mean  Sure  it might just be bold and italics to you  but not to a screen reader

User · Answer

Here s a summary of definitions together with suggested usage    lt b gt     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    lt strong gt     now represents importance rather than strong emphasis    lt i gt     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    lt em gt     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

User · Answer

I m going to hazard a historical and practical hot take here  Yes  according to specifications   lt strong gt  had a semantic meaning in HTML4 and  lt b gt  had a strictly presentational meaning  Yes  when HTML5 came along  new semantic meaning that was slightly different was introduced for b and i  Yes  the W3C recommends     basically     TL DR  don t use b and i   You should always bear in mind that the content of a b element may not always be bold  and that of an i element may not always be italic  The actual style is dependent on the CSS style definitions  You should also bear in mind that bold and italic may not be the preferred style for content in certain languages  You should not use b and i tags if there is a more descriptive and relevant tag available   BUT  The real world internet has massive loads of existing HTML that is never going to get updated  The real world internet has to account for content generated and copy and pasted between a vast network of software and CMS systems that all have different developer teams and were built in different eras  So if you re writing HTML or building a system that writes HTML for other people     sure     definitely use  lt strong gt  instead of  lt b gt  to mean  quot strongly emphasized quot  because it s more semantically correct  But really  the on-the-ground reality is that the semantic and stylistic meaning of  lt strong gt  and  lt b gt  have merged over time out of necessity  If I m building a CMS that allows any pasting of styled text  I need to plan both for people who are pasting in  lt b gt  and mean  quot strongly emphasized quot  and for people who are pasting in  lt strong gt  and mean  quot make this text bold quot   It might not be  quot right quot   but it s how the real world works at this moment in time  And so  if I m writing a stylesheet for that site  I m probably going to end up writing some styles that look like this  b  strong     font-weight  700           more styles here       i  em     font-style  italic           more styles here       Or  I m going to rely on the browser defaults  which do the same thing as the code above in every modern browser I know of  Or  I might be one of probably millions of sites that use normalize css  which takes care to ensure that b and strong are treated the same  There s such a massive ocean of HTML out there in the world already that works off of this expectation  I just can t imagine that b will EVER be depreciated in favor of strong or that browsers will ever start displaying them differently by default  So that s it  That s my hot take on semantics  history and the real world  Are b i and strong em the same  No  Will they probably both exist and be treated as identical in almost every situation until the collapse of modern civilization  I think  yes

User · Answer

lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are explicit - they specify bold and italic respectively    lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are semantic - they specify that the enclosed text should be  strong  or  emphasised  in some way  usually bold and italic  but allow for the actual styling to be controlled via CSS   Hence these are preferred in modern web pages

User · Answer

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    lt b gt  is a style - we know what  bold  is supposed to look like    lt strong gt  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    lt strong gt  is semantic mdash 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

User · Answer

lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are explicit - they specify bold and italic respectively    lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are semantic - they specify that the enclosed text should be  strong  or  emphasised  in some way  usually bold and italic  but allow for the actual styling to be controlled via CSS   Hence these are preferred in modern web pages

User · Answer

lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  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    lt b gt  and  lt i gt  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

User · Answer

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    lt b gt  is a style - we know what  bold  is supposed to look like    lt strong gt  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    lt strong gt  is semantic mdash 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

User · Answer

b or i means you want the text to be rendered as bold or italics  strong or em means you want the text to be rendered in a way that the user understands as  important   The default is to render strong as bold and em as italics  but some other cultures might use a different mapping   Like strings in a program  b and i would be  hard coded  while strong and em would be  localized

User · Answer

As others have said  lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are explicit  i e   make this text bold    whereas  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are semantic  i e   this text should be emphasised     In the context of a modern web-browser  it s difficult to see the difference  they both appear to produce the same result  right    but think about screen readers for the visually impaired  If a screen-reader came across an  lt i gt  tag  it wouldn t know what to do  But if it comes across a  lt em gt  tag  it knows that whatever is within should be emphasised to the listener  And therein you get the practical difference

User · Answer

lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  consume more bandwidth than  lt i gt  and  lt b gt    They also require more typing  if not auto-generated    They also clutter the editor screen with more text  I seem to recall that programmers like smaller source files if they are the same   And let s be real  they are the same  Yes  there are  technical    lt i gt cough lt  i gt   ahem  excuse me  differences  but that s mostly phony to begin with    With any of the above tags  you can use style sheets to customize how they appear to however you want if you need them to appear different than their defaults renderings

User · Answer

As others have said  lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are explicit  i e   make this text bold    whereas  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are semantic  i e   this text should be emphasised     In the context of a modern web-browser  it s difficult to see the difference  they both appear to produce the same result  right    but think about screen readers for the visually impaired  If a screen-reader came across an  lt i gt  tag  it wouldn t know what to do  But if it comes across a  lt em gt  tag  it knows that whatever is within should be emphasised to the listener  And therein you get the practical difference

User · Answer

lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are abstract  which is what people mean when they say it s semantic    lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are specific ways of making something  strong  or  emphasized   Analogy   Both  lt strong gt  is to  lt b gt  and  lt em gt  is to  lt i gt    as    vehicle  is to  jeep

User · Answer

lt b gt  and  lt i gt  should be avoided because they describe the style of the text  Instead  use  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  because that describes the semantics  the meaning  of the text   As with all things in HTML  you should be thinking not about how you want it to look  but what you actually mean  Sure  it might just be bold and italics to you  but not to a screen reader

User · Answer

Here s a summary of definitions together with suggested usage    lt b gt     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    lt strong gt     now represents importance rather than strong emphasis    lt i gt     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    lt em gt     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

User · Answer

As the others have stated  the difference is that  lt b gt  and  lt i gt  hardcode font styles  whereas  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  dictate semantic meaning  with the font style  or speaking browser intonation  or what-have-you  to be determined at the time the text is rendered  or spoken    You can think of this as a difference between a  ldquo physical rdquo  font style and a  ldquo logical rdquo  style  if you will   At some later time  you may wish to change the way  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  text are displayed  say  by altering properties in a style sheet to add color and size changes  or even to use different font faces entirely   If you ve used  ldquo logical rdquo  markup instead of hardcoded  ldquo physical rdquo  markup  then you can simply change the display properties in one place each in your style sheet  and then all of the pages that reference that style sheet get changed automatically  without ever having to edit them   Pretty slick  huh   This is also the rationale behind defining sub-styles  referenced using the style  property in text tags  for paragraphs  table cells  header text  captions  etc   and using  lt div gt  tags   You can define physical representation for your logical styles in the style sheet  and the changes are automatically reflected in the web pages that reference that style sheet   Want a different representation for source code   Redefine the font  size  weight  spacing  etc  for your  code  style   If you use XHTML  you can even define your own semantic tags  and your style sheet would do the conversions to physical font styles and layouts for you

User · Answer

While  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are of course more semantically correct  there seem definite legitimate reasons to use the  lt b gt  and  lt i gt  tags for customer-written content    In such content  words or phrases may be bolded or italicized and it is generally  not up to us to analyze the semantic reasoning for such bolding or italicizing    Further  such content may refer to bolded and italicized words and phrases to convey a specific meaning    An example would be an english exam question which instructs a student to replace the bolded word

User · Answer

lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  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    lt b gt  and  lt i gt  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

User · Answer

lt i gt    lt b gt    lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  tags are traditionally representational  But they have been given new semantic meaning in HTML5     lt i gt  and  lt b gt  was used for font style in HTML4   lt i gt  was used for italic and  lt b gt  for bold  In HTML5  lt i gt  tag has new semantic meaning of  alternate voice or mood  and  lt b gt  tag has the meaning of stylistically offset    Example uses of  lt i gt  tag are - taxonomic designation  technical term  idiomatic phrase from another language  transliteration  a thought  ship names in western texts  Such as -   lt p gt  lt i gt I hope this works lt  i gt   he thought  lt  p gt    Example uses of  lt b gt  tag are keywords in a document extract  product names in a review  actionable words in an interactive text driven software  article lead   The following example paragraph is stylistically offset from the paragraphs that follow it    lt p gt  lt b class  lead  gt The event takes place this upcoming Saturday  and over 3 000 people have already registered  lt  b gt  lt  p gt     lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  had the meaning of emphasis and strong emphasis in HTML4  But in HTML5  lt em gt  means stressed emphasis and  lt strong gt  means strong importance   In the following example there should be a linguistic change while reading the word before       lt p gt Make sure to sign up  lt em gt before lt  em gt  the day of the event  September 16  2016 lt  p gt    In the same example we can use the  lt strong gt  tag as follows      lt p gt Make sure to sign up  lt em gt before lt  em gt  the day of the event   lt strong gt September 16  2016 lt  strong gt  lt  p gt    to give importance on the event date   MDN Ref    https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Web HTML Element b  https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Web HTML Element i    https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Web HTML Element em   https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Web HTML Element strong

User · Answer

lt b gt  and  lt i gt  should be avoided because they describe the style of the text  Instead  use  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  because that describes the semantics  the meaning  of the text   As with all things in HTML  you should be thinking not about how you want it to look  but what you actually mean  Sure  it might just be bold and italics to you  but not to a screen reader

User · Answer

They have the same effect  However  XHTML  a cleaner  newer version of HTML  recommends the use of the  lt strong gt  tag  Strong is better because it is easier to read - its meaning is clearer  Additionally   lt strong gt  conveys a meaning - showing the text strongly - while  lt b gt   for bold  conveys a method - bolding the text  With strong  your code still makes sense if you use CSS stylesheets to change what the methods of making the text strong is   The same goes for the difference between  lt i gt  and  lt em gt      Google dixit   http   wiki answers com Q What is the difference between HTML tags b and strong

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While  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are of course more semantically correct  there seem definite legitimate reasons to use the  lt b gt  and  lt i gt  tags for customer-written content    In such content  words or phrases may be bolded or italicized and it is generally  not up to us to analyze the semantic reasoning for such bolding or italicizing    Further  such content may refer to bolded and italicized words and phrases to convey a specific meaning    An example would be an english exam question which instructs a student to replace the bolded word

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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    lt b gt  is a style - we know what  bold  is supposed to look like    lt strong gt  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    lt strong gt  is semantic mdash 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

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You should generally try to avoid  lt b gt  and  lt i gt   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  lt i gt  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    lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  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

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You should generally try to avoid  lt b gt  and  lt i gt   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  lt i gt  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    lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  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

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In HTML Lang  these two tags are used as follows  simple text this is test text normal text    simple text this is important textwith normal text  The major diversity between these two HTML tags is that bold makes text only visually look bold  while strong also symbolism hit the respective text as essential and indicates that it is a clear word or text section  This difference is due to the fact that HTML code differentiates between symbolism and physical visual html tags  While the earlier refer to the meaning of the relevant areas  the latter merely define the optical display in browsers  You can check this from here

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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    lt b gt  is a style - we know what  bold  is supposed to look like    lt strong gt  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    lt strong gt  is semantic mdash 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

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lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are both related to style  whereas  lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  are semantic  In HTML 4  the first are classified as font style elements  and the latter as phrase elements   As you indicated correctly   lt i gt  and  lt em gt  are often considered similar  because browsers often render both in italics  But according to the specifications   lt em gt  indicates emphasis and  lt strong gt  indicates stronger emphasis  which is quite clear  but often misinterpreted  On the other hand  the distinction between when to use  lt i gt  or  lt b gt  is really a matter of style

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Use them only if using CSS style classes is for any reason unconvinient or impossible  like blog systems  allow only some tags to use in posts and eventually embedded styles   Another reason is support for very old browsers  some mobile devices   or primitive search engines  that give points for  lt b gt  or  lt strong gt  tags  instead of analysing CSS styles    If you can define CSS styles  use them

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They have the same effect  However  XHTML  a cleaner  newer version of HTML  recommends the use of the  lt strong gt  tag  Strong is better because it is easier to read - its meaning is clearer  Additionally   lt strong gt  conveys a meaning - showing the text strongly - while  lt b gt   for bold  conveys a method - bolding the text  With strong  your code still makes sense if you use CSS stylesheets to change what the methods of making the text strong is   The same goes for the difference between  lt i gt  and  lt em gt      Google dixit   http   wiki answers com Q What is the difference between HTML tags b and strong

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As the others have stated  the difference is that  lt b gt  and  lt i gt  hardcode font styles  whereas  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  dictate semantic meaning  with the font style  or speaking browser intonation  or what-have-you  to be determined at the time the text is rendered  or spoken    You can think of this as a difference between a  ldquo physical rdquo  font style and a  ldquo logical rdquo  style  if you will   At some later time  you may wish to change the way  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  text are displayed  say  by altering properties in a style sheet to add color and size changes  or even to use different font faces entirely   If you ve used  ldquo logical rdquo  markup instead of hardcoded  ldquo physical rdquo  markup  then you can simply change the display properties in one place each in your style sheet  and then all of the pages that reference that style sheet get changed automatically  without ever having to edit them   Pretty slick  huh   This is also the rationale behind defining sub-styles  referenced using the style  property in text tags  for paragraphs  table cells  header text  captions  etc   and using  lt div gt  tags   You can define physical representation for your logical styles in the style sheet  and the changes are automatically reflected in the web pages that reference that style sheet   Want a different representation for source code   Redefine the font  size  weight  spacing  etc  for your  code  style   If you use XHTML  you can even define your own semantic tags  and your style sheet would do the conversions to physical font styles and layouts for you

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lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are abstract  which is what people mean when they say it s semantic    lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are specific ways of making something  strong  or  emphasized   Analogy   Both  lt strong gt  is to  lt b gt  and  lt em gt  is to  lt i gt    as    vehicle  is to  jeep

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We use the  lt strong gt  tag for text which has high priority for SEO purposes like product name  company name etc  while  lt b gt  simple makes it bold   Similarly  we use  lt em gt  for text which has high priority for SEO  while  lt i gt  to make the text simply italic

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lt i gt    lt b gt    lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  tags are traditionally representational  But they have been given new semantic meaning in HTML5     lt i gt  and  lt b gt  was used for font style in HTML4   lt i gt  was used for italic and  lt b gt  for bold  In HTML5  lt i gt  tag has new semantic meaning of  alternate voice or mood  and  lt b gt  tag has the meaning of stylistically offset    Example uses of  lt i gt  tag are - taxonomic designation  technical term  idiomatic phrase from another language  transliteration  a thought  ship names in western texts  Such as -   lt p gt  lt i gt I hope this works lt  i gt   he thought  lt  p gt    Example uses of  lt b gt  tag are keywords in a document extract  product names in a review  actionable words in an interactive text driven software  article lead   The following example paragraph is stylistically offset from the paragraphs that follow it    lt p gt  lt b class  lead  gt The event takes place this upcoming Saturday  and over 3 000 people have already registered  lt  b gt  lt  p gt     lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  had the meaning of emphasis and strong emphasis in HTML4  But in HTML5  lt em gt  means stressed emphasis and  lt strong gt  means strong importance   In the following example there should be a linguistic change while reading the word before       lt p gt Make sure to sign up  lt em gt before lt  em gt  the day of the event  September 16  2016 lt  p gt    In the same example we can use the  lt strong gt  tag as follows      lt p gt Make sure to sign up  lt em gt before lt  em gt  the day of the event   lt strong gt September 16  2016 lt  strong gt  lt  p gt    to give importance on the event date   MDN Ref    https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Web HTML Element b  https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Web HTML Element i    https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Web HTML Element em   https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Web HTML Element strong

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b or i means you want the text to be rendered as bold or italics  strong or em means you want the text to be rendered in a way that the user understands as  important   The default is to render strong as bold and em as italics  but some other cultures might use a different mapping   Like strings in a program  b and i would be  hard coded  while strong and em would be  localized

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lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  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    lt b gt  and  lt i gt  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

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lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are explicit - they specify bold and italic respectively    lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are semantic - they specify that the enclosed text should be  strong  or  emphasised  in some way  usually bold and italic  but allow for the actual styling to be controlled via CSS   Hence these are preferred in modern web pages

User · Answer

You should generally try to avoid  lt b gt  and  lt i gt   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  lt i gt  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    lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  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

User · Answer

HTML Formatting Elements   HTML also defines special elements for defining text with a special meaning  HTML uses elements like  lt b  and  lt i  for formatting output  like bold or italic text   HTML Bold and Strong Formatting      The HTML  lt b  element defines bold text  without any extra importance     lt b gt This text is bold lt  b gt       The HTML  lt strong  element defines strong text  with added semantic    strong  importance     lt strong gt This text is strong lt  strong gt    HTML Italic and Emphasized Formatting      The HTML  lt i  element defines italic text  without any extra   importance     lt i gt This text is italic lt  i gt       The HTML  lt em  element defines emphasized text  with added semantic   importance     lt em gt This text is emphasized lt  em gt

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For  text  bold  using   lt b gt   tag  For  text  important  using   lt strong gt   tag  For  text  italic  style  using   lt i gt   tag  For   emphasized text using   lt em gt   tag

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I use both  lt strong gt  and  lt b gt   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  lt strong gt all lt  strong gt  books about  lt b gt lacrosse lt  b gt     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-- lt b gt  is most definitely not deprecated  as some people have claimed  For me  it s just a fine line between visual appeal and meaning

User · Answer

lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are both related to style  whereas  lt em gt  and  lt strong gt  are semantic  In HTML 4  the first are classified as font style elements  and the latter as phrase elements   As you indicated correctly   lt i gt  and  lt em gt  are often considered similar  because browsers often render both in italics  But according to the specifications   lt em gt  indicates emphasis and  lt strong gt  indicates stronger emphasis  which is quite clear  but often misinterpreted  On the other hand  the distinction between when to use  lt i gt  or  lt b gt  is really a matter of style

User · Answer

b or i means you want the text to be rendered as bold or italics  strong or em means you want the text to be rendered in a way that the user understands as  important   The default is to render strong as bold and em as italics  but some other cultures might use a different mapping   Like strings in a program  b and i would be  hard coded  while strong and em would be  localized

User · Answer

They have the same effect  However  XHTML  a cleaner  newer version of HTML  recommends the use of the  lt strong gt  tag  Strong is better because it is easier to read - its meaning is clearer  Additionally   lt strong gt  conveys a meaning - showing the text strongly - while  lt b gt   for bold  conveys a method - bolding the text  With strong  your code still makes sense if you use CSS stylesheets to change what the methods of making the text strong is   The same goes for the difference between  lt i gt  and  lt em gt      Google dixit   http   wiki answers com Q What is the difference between HTML tags b and strong

User · Answer

While  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are of course more semantically correct  there seem definite legitimate reasons to use the  lt b gt  and  lt i gt  tags for customer-written content    In such content  words or phrases may be bolded or italicized and it is generally  not up to us to analyze the semantic reasoning for such bolding or italicizing    Further  such content may refer to bolded and italicized words and phrases to convey a specific meaning    An example would be an english exam question which instructs a student to replace the bolded word

User · Answer

As others have said  lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are explicit  i e   make this text bold    whereas  lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are semantic  i e   this text should be emphasised     In the context of a modern web-browser  it s difficult to see the difference  they both appear to produce the same result  right    but think about screen readers for the visually impaired  If a screen-reader came across an  lt i gt  tag  it wouldn t know what to do  But if it comes across a  lt em gt  tag  it knows that whatever is within should be emphasised to the listener  And therein you get the practical difference

User · Answer

lt b gt  and  lt i gt  are explicit - they specify bold and italic respectively    lt strong gt  and  lt em gt  are semantic - they specify that the enclosed text should be  strong  or  emphasised  in some way  usually bold and italic  but allow for the actual styling to be controlled via CSS   Hence these are preferred in modern web pages

[html] What's the difference between <b> and <strong>, <i> and <em>?

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