Nice article, Jem. I haven’t been playing with web-design for a while now but I’d thinking of getting back into it, making a new layout etc. I’m just wondering if you could explain (or point me to a link) to the difference between a presentational tag such as “b” and more valid tags such as “strong”? Doesn’t “b” stand for “bold”? Isn’t that what it’s doing to the text, and hence does have meaning?
@Belinda: “bold” is presentational. Your actual purpose is not to “make the text bold”. You wish to place a (strong) emphasis on it, whence the “strong”. As far as I know, though, “b” is not invalid.
@Belinda: yes, b is for bold, but what does bold text actually mean? I could make text bold for the sake of it, but it’d simply change the appearance and have no structural meaning – therefore it’s a presentational tag (b, i, u, s, etc.. all the same). The strong tag however, is designed specifically to give strong emphasis to a piece of text as you would give spoken emphasis. E.g. “Oh [strong]that’s[/strong] where the bloody cat hid my keys!” I hope that makes sense.. @Jordan: fixed. I’d cocked up Acronymer, which was breaking the link. :S
Belinda said:
On 07 Feb at 11:34 pm
Nice article, Jem. I haven’t been playing with web-design for a while now but I’d thinking of getting back into it, making a new layout etc. I’m just wondering if you could explain (or point me to a link) to the difference between a presentational tag such as “b” and more valid tags such as “strong”? Doesn’t “b” stand for “bold”? Isn’t that what it’s doing to the text, and hence does have meaning?
Julie said:
On 08 Feb at 12:59 am
@Belinda: “bold” is presentational. Your actual purpose is not to “make the text bold”. You wish to place a (strong) emphasis on it, whence the “strong”. As far as I know, though, “b” is not invalid.
Jordan said:
On 08 Feb at 6:55 am
Broken link ftl! :P
Jem said:
On 08 Feb at 9:30 am
@Belinda: yes, b is for bold, but what does bold text actually mean? I could make text bold for the sake of it, but it’d simply change the appearance and have no structural meaning – therefore it’s a presentational tag (b, i, u, s, etc.. all the same). The strong tag however, is designed specifically to give strong emphasis to a piece of text as you would give spoken emphasis. E.g. “Oh [strong]that’s[/strong] where the bloody cat hid my keys!” I hope that makes sense.. @Jordan: fixed. I’d cocked up Acronymer, which was breaking the link. :S
Sarah said:
On 08 Feb at 9:52 pm
Watch out for the you/you’re: “…if your code is 99% valid and all *your* missing is an unescaped…” (Emphasis mine.)
Jem said:
On 08 Feb at 10:43 pm
Merci beaucoup, Sarah ;)