<b></b> vs. <strong></strong>

[kender]

good point carbonize..
and personally.. i dont use the proper coding in most situations..

though i do use css, i do also use it in a manner that the formatting goes through (basically) for those who dont have css enabled

if my css [b] has formatting for changing size, and font as well.. non css will just see the boldness

[carol]

I'm certainly all for "accessibility" of the web, whether an individual is sight/hearing/motion/financially etc. impaired or not. However, some of the issues we are discussing ([b] vs. [b], etc.) are unfortunately inherently visual issues. They represent ways that an individual author chooses to emphasize or enhance the written word. It's as difficult to standardize expression(what about using italics, or all caps - of course, we can't use underline anymore, either) as it would be if we told Nathaniel Hawthorne that he had to write in the style of Stephen King or T.S.Eliot. IMO, the artificial intelligence engine which powers the accessible browsers of the future must be able to interpret all forms of visual expression.

[weegillis]

I have a question. How many of the people that have posted in this thread actually always use the correct tags?
How many of you have actually used <acronym title="blah"> when there is an acronym in the text?
or <DL><DT><DD> nest when showing a definition?
How about THEAD, TBODT, and TFOOT?

<abbr>? <cite>? <q>?

While many of you have commented about [b] being deprecated do you use the correct tags as described by the W3C ? This is the downside of wysiwyg editors as they don't know what the text is meant to represent.

There's a tip off the ol' noggin...

I've been researching the web accessibility guidelines, and there is an awful lot we're not doing. All along, I thought that by having fairly detailed alt and title attributes, and easy to find anchored details we were creating an accessible web site. Bobby says different, though happily we didn't stink up the place.

Rethinking our approach is the best I can offer. When I look at how much fixing is required to be completely accessible, and how much code and description, my only conclusion can be summed up in two words--text version.

The overhead for full-scale accessibility is far too great for sites with limited bandwidth availability.

However, Priority 1 accessibility is a must at all counts, I'll go along with that.

This is the focus of our attention, presently. Now we seek a decent model to select our tags from so that we would know the acceptable coding practice, whether hand coding (as I do 100%) or wysi-something-something-something-ing.

Then there are the additional style issues that come with tags such as <.address>. Another fix.

Confused? I am. The objective is clear, and owed full respect. Achieving it, well...

<.btw> [b] is not deprecated as far as the table at W3C shows; but it is clearly understood that readers and other parsing devices may ignore it. I'm glad I got that question answered today, 'cause that's all I wanted to know.<./btw>

[Narasinha]

I have a question. How many of the people that have posted in this thread actually always use the correct tags?
How many of you have actually used <acronym title="blah"> when there is an acronym in the text?
or <DL><DT><DD> nest when showing a definition?
How about THEAD, TBODT, and TFOOT?

<abbr>? <cite>? <q>?

Very good points. I've used the acronym, abbr, cite, q, and dl/dt/dd tags properly in my personal web page. Now I'm trying to make a forum template conversion to make it accessible.

One of the major problems regarding this is that the forum software itself (phpBB2 is quite popular and falls into this category. It's what we're using right now.) does not create HTML that meets standards. That's regular 4.01 transitional/strict standards or WAI accessibility standards.

I've recently started taking apart a template for phpBB2 with the intention of rebuilding it so that the forum itself will meet accessibility guidelines. Then there are the problems with the posts themselves. Do you disable bbCode and HTML in the posts? What about acronyms and abbreviations and quotes and citations?

Perhaps the body of the posted message is too much to worry about right now. First I would like to get the forum software itself to meet the standards. I'll cross the other bridges when I get to them.

If you look at the source code of the posts here on the forum you'll notice that the styles like bold, underline, and italic are rendered using a <span style="font-style: italic"> or similar tag within the HTML. Also notice that the "list" bbCode tag creates a "UL" container, but does not provide any "LI" tag to indicate items of the list.

Those particular items are within the core of the phpBB2 software itself rather than being part of the templates. Disabling BBCode and HTML within the posts may be the best short-term solution.

[ranjan]

In todays world browsers are not the only user interfaces. Web interfaces comprise of browsers, screen readers, hand held interfaces (like palm pilot and cell phones), etc. Most of the new devices use browsing mediums that are built recently and hence ignore deprecated elements (tags and attributes). As the number of such modern devices grow, you website becomes more and more obsolete.

Understanding deprecated tags is simple.

(X)HTML is about content. It is a structured way of writing content sans style. CSS takes care of styling. So any tag/attribute that styles content is deprecated.

[b], [i] style the content to be bold or italics, [b] and [i] merely say that the content is strong and emphasized, most browsers just happen to display them as bold and italicized.

align="center" also styles the content and hence deprecated.

p { text-align: center; }

is what is right

[Webnauts]

Weegillis I use the <acronym> tag on my new under construction web site: http://www.webnauts.net/css_final/index.shtml

Example of using <acronym> tags in XHTML 1.0 Strict:

<acronym title="World Wide Web" lang="en" xml:lang="en"><span title="World Wide Web" lang="en" xml:lang="en">WWW</span></acronym>

[weegillis]

Meant to thank you for that example, Webnauts. Now all I need to do is find all the acronyms in our site and write that code into the pages. Does it ever end? :-)) Thanks.

[Webnauts]

If not mentioned here:

I and B are presentational tags. Strong and Emphasis are semantic markup tags.

Screen readers treat Strong and Em differently that B and I, because Strong and Em actually mean something, whereas B and I are just B and I.

[Webnauts]

If not mentioned here:

I and B are presentational tags. Strong and Emphasis are semantic markup tags.

Screen readers treat Strong and Em differently that B and I, because Strong and Em actually mean something, whereas B and I are just B and I.

[davebarnes]

The advantage to the "strong" tag is that the "b" tag is now deprecated. While it still works, at any time it could be phased out by a new revision of html. I recommend using the strong tag to keep your pages up to date.

Four years on and my b tags are still working quite nicely.

Of course I use CSS most of the time, but those b tags don't seem broken to me.