Design Coding


(YouTube link)

The Poetic Prophet, aka The SEO Rapper has a nerdcore rap about properly coding your html to optimize your website. Now can someone explain to me why strong is better than bold? -via Viral Video Chart

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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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