Re: Bold vs Strong

These pages may help in terms of what HTML and browsers believe the styling
and semantics for em and strong are, which are generally used within
paragraphs, span, div, and table tags. If another tag, like headers or
labels, are used - it's best to style those with css rather than add more
html around the text. These tags already have semantic meaning and adding
more can cause confusion in meaning and complicate styling - making unhappy
developers.
https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_em.asp
https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_phrase_test

The b and i tags were part of HTML to style the text, though did not
provide semantic meaning. As seen from the html_phrase_test link above,
browsers general style em as italics and strong as bold, but you can use
css to style how every you need without changing the semantics.
Hypothetically, would you use the b tag with css to unbold it? Or would
using the strong tag be better without bolding?

Thanks,
Ann



On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 3:51 PM George Kerscher <kerscher@montana.com> wrote:

> Hello folks,
>
> Well, I thought I would jump in...
>
> >From the digital publishing space, now part of the W3C, comes my question.
>
> Is this correct markup that would work for everybody?
>
> Let us say from this grammar book:
>
> In the following examples the words in bold are nouns, verbs are italic,
> adjectives are double-underlined, and adverbs are underlined. If the
> students would like to read the explicit semantics, please expand the
> details to find the part of speech immediately before the word.
>
> <p aria-details="#for-screen-readers">The <strong
> class="double-underline">red</strong> <b>fox</b> <em
> class="underline">quickly</em> <em>ran</em> away.</p>
> <details id="for-screen-readers"><summary>with explicit semantics</summary>
> The (adjective) red (noun) fox (adverb) quickly (verb) ran away.</details>
>
> Best
> George
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: chagnon@pubcom.com <chagnon@pubcom.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 7, 2018 1:28 PM
> To: 'w3c-wai-ig' <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
> Subject: RE: Bold vs Strong
>
> Great question, Janina.
>
> The concept of tags to indicate when text is italicized and bolded goes
> back
> to the mid- to late-1990s, if I recall correctly. 20 years ago.
>
> The idea was how could we convey the visual formatting we were putting on
> certain words for certain purposes. Both bold and italics are used to
> emphasize words, or stress them if they are being spoken.
>
> I know we also talked briefly about other uses of formatting, such as using
> bold to format headings (usually, but not always), and using italics for
> all
> sorts of text like publication titles, foreign words, medical and
> scientific
> terms, citations, ship names, and many more. But that part of the
> discussion
> faded and never went further.
>
> All these uses are just conventions of American English grammar; British
> grammar varies a bit, but is mostly the same.
>
> I doubt think that the emphasis and strong tags have worked out as well as
> we thought they would. One primary reason: how many assistive technologies
> actually recognize and announce them? Another is just as you mentioned:
> strong and emphasis can be swapped between bold and italics and it wouldn't
> matter much to a screen reader user.
>
> A bolded heading doesn't need to have the bold/strong information relayed
> because the "importance of being bold" is implied in the Hx heading tags
> themselves. But I'd like to see more tags based on usage, rather than
> visual
> formatting; Tags for titles of publications, citations, foreign terms, etc.
> I think those would be very beneficial to the our users because they convey
> not just the visual formatting but also the intention or meaning of the
> words.
>
> Any development in this area will need to go through the various standards
> committees for WCAG, PDF/UA, EPUB, etc.
>
> - - -
> Bevi Chagnon, founder/CEO  |  Bevi@PubCom.com
> - - -
> PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing
> consulting . training . development . design . sec. 508 services
> Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes
> - - -
> Latest blog-newsletter - Accessibility Tips
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 7, 2018 1:57 PM
>
> Phil, All:
>
> I recognize WCAG has been suggesting that "strong" and "emphasis" are
> semantic designations for many, many years.
>
> May I ask where we got this definition? I can't seem to find any grammar
> text that speaks of bold or italics using such terms. So, what's our
> authority?
>
> I'd like to know because I, myself, am constantly getting them confused in
> my own mind. I don't have that same problem with bold or italic, even those
> are type-faces I haven't seen for myself in decades.
>
> Let me hasten to underscore my strong support for semantic markup. I'm just
> not convinced these two terms are all that semantic. They strike me as
> rather arbitrary. I could equally accept a definition that said bold equals
> emphasis, and italics equals strong.
>
> So, please educate me.
>
> Thanks,
> Janina
>
>
>
>
>
>
>