Posted by Toby A Inkster on 02/16/07 08:18

Helpful Harry wrote:

> Since when is [strong] a "relationship between information
> components"?!?!? It's telling the browser that the following text
> shoulld be rendered in bold until it finds a corresponding [/strong]
> tag.

No -- STRONG specifies that the enclosed text is more important than the
surrounding text. That is a relationship between information components.
To quote from the HTML 4.01 Recommendation:

| EM: Indicates emphasis.
| STRONG: Indicates stronger emphasis.

STRONG is not necessarily rendered in bold, it may be rendered instead in
italics, underline, red text or some combination of those. Text-only
environments may present STRONG text by prepending and appending asterisks
*like* *this* or by transformation to UPPERCASE.

It is valid to use STRONG to emphasise text in headings, even though
headings are ususally already in bold:

<h1>I Asked You <strong>Not</strong> to do That!</h1>

As STRONG indicates that something is emphasised more than the surrounding
text, it is often desirable to use STRONG within STRONG to emphasise a
particular word or phrase more strongly than some surrounding, already
strongly emphasised text:

<p><strong>Beware! To touch these wires is
<strong>instant death</strong>. Anyone found
doing so will be prosecuted.</strong></p>

> HTML code simply tells a browser how to render a page on-screen.

This is totally wrong in so many ways. Some browsers don't even *have*
screens.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

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