Bold? Italic? It’s all semantic to me.
By Dave Shea | May 4th, 2004 | Filed in HTML/XHTML
Skip to comment formWhile we all know a big goal of the W3C’s work is to separate our presentation from our document’s structure, Matthew Thomas points out that sometimes the proper elements to do the job don’t exist.
When semantic markup goes bad showcases logical flaws in, for example, replacing all instances of <b> elements in your markup with <strong>.
It’s true, the proper elements for the job don’t always exist in the various flavours of HTML and XHTML. Your approach in dealing with these cases will vary depending on how you see the world. What’s clear from Matthew’s analysis is that simply steamrolling ahead with global use of <em> and <strong> is the wrong approach.