Sent by Lachlan Cannon on 8 July 2002 00:12
\Earl Cooley\ said:
> Brandon Oto wrote:
>> [...] People say em and strong are better because
>> they\'re structural instead of presentational - but it\'s good to
>> remember that there are cases where you\'d want presentational
>> elements, as well. So don\'t abandon ye old markup entirely.
>
> Do browsers actually render em and strong differently from i and
> b? If not, then you\'re just squandering bandwidth by using longer
> markup when shorter does the same thing.
Ouch. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. The point is that em carries
the meaning of emphasis, strong carries the meaning of strongly
emphasised. If say a voice browser encounters these then it can say it
more emphatically than usual, or very emphatically, because it knows that
that's what it means. If it encounters <i>.. what does italics mean to a
voice browser? The italics could mean it's a language change, emphasis, a
citation, etc or it could just be there because the person likes italics.
How is the browser supposed to know? And if your pages are that big that
you have to worry about cutting out one byte from em and 5 bytes from
strong, then I'd go back through your page and see what else you have that
you can get rid of.
Lach
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