<strong> or <b>

HI I use Dreamweaver to make websites but I do have an outof date copy of it. IE when I make somthing in bold dreamweaver makes the code <strong>bold text</strong> but I have also found that <b>bold text</b> works as well which is the on to use?

<strong> is semanticly different from <b>, even though nearly all modern browsers display them the same.

You might use <b> to denote an important word, while you might use <strong> to denote an imortant phrase.

<b> is deprecated now. If you want to display text in bold, use CSS.

As Joe said, <strong> is for important text, and most browsers display it in bold to point out that the text is important.

I usually use <strong> instead of <b> and no CSS... is that semantically correct or incorrect?

I use both <strong> and <b>. I tend to use <strong> when I feel one piece of bolded text is more important than another. I usually apply a background color to simulate a highlighter marking from a paper document with <strong> too.

I do the same thing with <em> VS <i>.

<b> is not deprecated.

I tend to use <span class='bold'></span> and then just give it a font-weight of bold for sentences, but for single words I use <b> ...

I must say I didn't know that <b> and <strong> were different I just assumed that <strong> was an out-of-date way of making something bold. Thanks!

I think completely the opposite ... or did until some time ago...

Using strong (boldly rendered) emphasis is something to be avoided, most of the time, just stylistically, when writing text. Using <b> to "set things apart", in a way that doesn't provide emphasis, is alluded to by some future version of HTML. Using <b>tastysite write:</b> and <b>joebert wrote:</b> in the quoting of the above post would be one example.

But semantics don't matter, from the end-user's perspective. <b> or <strong> or <span class="myveryverboseclassname"> are all fine. (Maybe it matters to search engines.) The reason to care about semantics, though, is to be flexible in how you can render your document. If you want to change the rendering later with CSS, it makes sense to have a distinction between <strong>emphasis</emphasis> and other forms of <b>setting text apart</b>. But it would make even more sense to separate out semantic meaning with <span="foo"> and <span="bar">. (<span="bold"> is just stupid, though.) Then you have the flexibility to change the style by which things are displayed as you develop your pages.

At least, that would be the case if you wrote your HTML by hand. Which is just the wrong thing to do. It's better to generate HTML, because <span="foo">blah</span> is worse than writing <foo>blah</foo> or {foo blah}

HI I must say I not sure it matters because I used this code and got this http://www.box.net/shared/273qqfjkso and both look the same!

Huh?

That whole post was a "huh?" moment for me ...

<em> and <strong> are not the same as <i> and <b>, respectively, and are not intended for the same purpose.

<i> and <b> are used to make text italic and bold, that's all. They're essentially shortcuts to using things like <span style="font-wight: bold"> (or generic spanning classes).

<em> and <strong>, on the other hand, are intended to be used to add emphasis. Just because browsers usually render these as italic and bold does not mean they are the same. These tags can be rendered differently by different output devices, such as screen readers and mobile devices. In some cases, <em> and <strong> are not rendered as italic and bold text.


Thus the two are not directly interchangeable. There's proper uses for both.

Exactly what spork said... <em> and <strong> don't have a "set" way they will display... I guess reading this thread told me I used <strong> and <em> incorrectly