Apparently when posting bold text and italic text you are meant to use strong and em tags instead of b and i tags (which look like bold and italic) due to the latter tags being used for formatting and don’t *mean* anything. Personally i reckon that bold text means a lot more to people that strong text does. Does this mean that one day we are going to see the Worlds Strongest Text on tv (with the endless repeats?). Thanks to A List Aparts page on hacking dreamweaver which incidentally looks like a good way of customising the editor. Zempt uses the strong and em tags when writing posts, but bloggar doesn’t. Fortunately in this case I happened to use Zempt to write this post.
Comments
There isn’t a hard and fast rule as to which one to use, but basically <strong> has semantic meaning and <b> does not. If you wanted to make text bold to make it look nicer, then you’d use <b>. If you wanted to put emphasis on a word in sentence, eg ‘He was SO angry that time!’, you would use <strong> around the ‘so’ so that a text-to-speech reader would know to emphasise that word when reading it.
It’s really nothing to lose sleep over, though.