Design Coding

• kjguioyo8t
  March 29th, 2008 at 11:25 am

  Strong is a heuristic, bold is a font property. Good html is supposed to be as general as possible so it can be displayed on as many different types of devices as possible. Some devices might not support bold text but there might be some way to emphasize text to support the use of the strong key.

• Edward
  March 29th, 2008 at 11:32 am

  The next time some tight-fisted, “my son can make websites” client asks me for advice, I am going to send him this video. It is perfect, he will understand neither the genre nor the subject matter.

  Oh, yeah. I should add: Dude knows design. Note the whitespace before and after the text, the general lack of clutter as well as the subtle message on his shirt.

• Miss Cellania
  March 29th, 2008 at 11:46 am

  Thanks, kjguioyo8t! That makes sense to me.

• ted
  March 29th, 2008 at 1:01 pm

  tee-hee.
  More entertaining than I thought it would be.

• clinton labombard
  March 29th, 2008 at 1:21 pm

  Come to the dark side, my children. Learn to code by hand with a text editor. Learn to combine PHP and MySQL with DHTML and /you/ will be strong.

• kaddar
  March 29th, 2008 at 1:55 pm

  I wonder if this is considered nerdcore?

• Agnostic Anarch
  March 29th, 2008 at 5:13 pm

  He explains why bold is better than strong in the song! And yeah… this is Nerdcore! I hope he tours with MC Frontalot on the next tour!

  ~AA

• aware
  March 29th, 2008 at 11:34 pm

  forwarded to a friend, and this is his answer for strong vs. bolld:

  “Strong vs. bold – strong is a semantic element. It can be interpreted by different technologies to provide the appropriate emphasis for the media used to deliver the content e.g. pitch change in a screen reader [voice output for blind users], or darker larger stroked characters in print.

  Bold is a print only related element. Bold is how strong is implemented in print. Semantically, bold should not be interpreted by a screen reader…but in practice it is treated as the strong element.

  It’s a nuance standardista thing. In html I always use strong, it’s semantically correct and whatever media is used to provide the content to the user the emphasis will be correct.”

• Alex
  March 30th, 2008 at 12:54 am

  OPP? No, OOP! (obscure?)

• Alex
  March 30th, 2008 at 12:55 am

  And btw, Neatorama is coded old-style. With tables (within tables!) and it ranks fine …

• R Pyle
  March 30th, 2008 at 11:01 am

  I could probably understand more of the rap if it didn’t have that horrendous bass line behind it. But what I did understand was solid coding.

• Berae McClary
  March 30th, 2008 at 5:44 pm

  Bold is blurrier than strong.

• HengeMon
  March 31st, 2008 at 12:49 am

  On the other hand, bold is implemented as being bold text so you know that if the device or browser supports it, your text will be bold. With strong you don’t know how the browser could have implemented it, so you need to exactly set the stylesheet information to match bold. Some kind of exotic device could display strong elements as italic or underlined, so you need to actively set in the CSS you don’t want that. Furthermore you don’t know what else of weird things the device may do to the strong element.

  I’m not saying that bold is better than strong in semantically correct HTML, I’m just saying you’re more certain of what will happen with your layout and design if you use bold instead of strong.

Want your own avatar? Get one for free at Gravatar!