Monday, March 1, 2010

I may be blind, but I'm not deaf!

Due to the full moon in Virgo, I simply must get this off my chest. If you have replaced all of your <b>'s with <strong>'s, your code is probably <wrong>. 99% of the code I've seen in the last several years is misusing <strong> and <em>. Even the Dreamweaver development team got it wrong.

<strong> does not mean bold; it means "strong emphasis". Voice readers for the visually impaired, when encountering the element, will place strong voice emphasis on the content placed between the <strong> tags. You are to use <b> or CSS if you simply want to display a word or phrase in bold letters. Otherwise, you are shouting unnecessarily at the visually impaired.

Similarly, <em> does not mean italics; it means "emphasis". Again, voice readers for the visually impaired, when encountering the element, will place voice emphasis on the content placed between the <em> tags. You are to use <i> or CSS if you simply want to display a word or phrase in italics.

Read what the W3C has to say about it: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_5.html.