On May 2, 2004, at 15:38, Ivan Krstic wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
For '' and ''' we produce <em> and <strong> tags rather than <i> and <b>. Is this right or wrong?
<b> and <i> are deprecated; neither exists in XHTML 1.0 basic or XHTML 2.0.
That doesn't make a case in favor of <em> and <strong>; the newer XHTML standards recommend the use of style sheets for non-semantic formatting, and many (most?) of the '' and '''s appearing on Wikipedia are not "emphasis" or "strong emphasis", but ship names, species names, foreign words, minor headings in tables, parenthetical text (like stub footers), mathematical variables, quotations, defining instances, etc.
Also note that XHTML 2.0 is incomplete. The working draft online indicates that there is not consensus on whether <strong> will be kept, deprecated, or even removed outright: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-inline-text.html#sec_9.11.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)