What's the difference between and , and ?

Question

What's the difference between <b> and <strong>, <i> and <em> in HTML/XHTML? When should you use each?

Answer 1

They have the same effect on normal web browser rendering engines, but there is a fundamental difference between them.

As the author writes in a discussion list post:

Think of three different situations:

• web browsers
• blind people
• mobile phones

"Bold" is a style - when you say "bold a word", people basically know that it means to add more, let's say "ink", around the letters until they stand out more amongst the rest of the letters.

That, unfortunately, means nothing to a blind person. On mobile phones and other PDAs, text is already bold because screen resolution is very small. You can't bold a bold without screwing something up.

<b> is a style - we know what "bold" is supposed to look like.

<strong> however is an indication of how something should be understood. "Strong" could (and often does) mean "bold" in a browser, but it could also mean a lower tone for a speaking program like Jaws (for blind people) or be represented by an underline (since you can't bold a bold) on a Palm Pilot.

HTML was never meant to be about styles. Do some searches for "Tim Berners-Lee" and "the semantic web." <strong> is semantic—it describes the text it surrounds (e.g., "this text should be stronger than the rest of the text you've displayed") as opposed to describing how the text it surrounds should be displayed (e.g., "this text should be bold").

Answer 2

<b> and <i> are explicit - they specify bold and italic respectively.

<strong> and <em> are semantic - they specify that the enclosed text should be "strong" or "emphasised" in some way, usually bold and italic, but allow for the actual styling to be controlled via CSS. Hence these are preferred in modern web pages.

Answer 3

<strong> and <em> add extra semantic meaning to your document. It just so happens that they also give a bold and italic style to your text.

You could of course override their styling with CSS.

<b> and <i> on the other hand only apply font styling and should no longer be used. (Because you're supposed to format with CSS, and if the text was actually important then you would probably make it "strong" or "emphasised" anyway!)

Hope that makes sense.

Answer 4

I'm going to hazard a historical and practical hot take here:

Yes, according to specifications, <strong> had a semantic meaning in HTML4 and <b> had a strictly presentational meaning.

Yes, when HTML5 came along, new semantic meaning that was slightly different was introduced for b and i.

Yes, the W3C recommends — basically — TL,DR; don't use b and i.

You should always bear in mind that the content of a b element may not always be bold, and that of an i element may not always be italic. The actual style is dependent on the CSS style definitions. You should also bear in mind that bold and italic may not be the preferred style for content in certain languages. You should not use b and i tags if there is a more descriptive and relevant tag available.

BUT:

The real world internet has massive loads of existing HTML that is never going to get updated. The real world internet has to account for content generated and copy and pasted between a vast network of software and CMS systems that all have different developer teams and were built in different eras.

So if you're writing HTML or building a system that writes HTML for other people — sure — definitely use <strong> instead of <b> to mean "strongly emphasized" because it's more semantically correct.

But really, the on-the-ground reality is that the semantic and stylistic meaning of <strong> and <b> have merged over time out of necessity.

If I'm building a CMS that allows any pasting of styled text, I need to plan both for people who are pasting in <b> and mean "strongly emphasized" and for people who are pasting in <strong> and mean "make this text bold". It might not be "right", but it's how the real world works at this moment in time.

And so, if I'm writing a stylesheet for that site, I'm probably going to end up writing some styles that look like this:

b,
strong {
  font-weight: 700;
  /* ... more styles here */
}

i,
em {
  font-style: italic;
  /* ... more styles here */
}

Or, I'm going to rely on the browser defaults, which do the same thing as the code above in every modern browser I know of.

Or, I might be one of probably millions of sites that use normalize.css, which takes care to ensure that b and strong are treated the same.

There's such a massive ocean of HTML out there in the world already that works off of this expectation, I just can't imagine that b will EVER be depreciated in favor of strong or that browsers will ever start displaying them differently by default.

So that's it. That's my hot take on semantics, history and the real world. Are b/i and strong/em the same? No. Will they probably both exist and be treated as identical in almost every situation until the collapse of modern civilization? I think, yes.

Answer 5

Here's a summary of definitions together with suggested usage:

<b> ...a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian purposes without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of an alternate voice or mood, such as key words in a document abstract, product names in a review, actionable words in interactive text-driven software, or an article lede.

<strong> ...now represents importance rather than strong emphasis.

<i> ...a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts.

<em> ...indicates emphasis.

(These are all direct quotes from W3C sources, with my emphasis added. See: https://rawgithub.com/whatwg/html-differences/master/Overview.html#changed-elements and http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1 for the originals)

Answer 6

<em> and <strong> consume more bandwidth than <i> and <b>.

They also require more typing (if not auto-generated).

They also clutter the editor screen with more text. I seem to recall that programmers like smaller source files if they are the same. (And let's be real, they are the same. Yes, there are "technical" (<i>cough</i>, ahem, excuse me) differences, but that's mostly phony to begin with.)

With any of the above tags, you can use style sheets to customize how they appear to however you want if you need them to appear different than their defaults renderings.

Answer 7

<b> and <i> are both related to style, whereas <em> and <strong> are semantic. In HTML 4, the first are classified as font style elements, and the latter as phrase elements.

As you indicated correctly, <i> and <em> are often considered similar, because browsers often render both in italics. But according to the specifications, <em> indicates emphasis and <strong> indicates stronger emphasis, which is quite clear, but often misinterpreted. On the other hand, the distinction between when to use <i> or <b> is really a matter of style.

Answer 8

While <strong> and <em> are of course more semantically correct, there seem definite legitimate reasons to use the <b> and <i> tags for customer-written content.

In such content, words or phrases may be bolded or italicized and it is generally not up to us to analyze the semantic reasoning for such bolding or italicizing.

Further, such content may refer to bolded and italicized words and phrases to convey a specific meaning.

An example would be an english exam question which instructs a student to replace the bolded word.

Answer 9

b or i means you want the text to be rendered as bold or italics. strong or em means you want the text to be rendered in a way that the user understands as "important". The default is to render strong as bold and em as italics, but some other cultures might use a different mapping.

Like strings in a program, b and i would be "hard coded" while strong and em would be "localized".

Answer 10

<i>, <b>, <em> and <strong> tags are traditionally representational. But they have been given new semantic meaning in HTML5.

<i> and <b> was used for font style in HTML4. <i> was used for italic and <b> for bold. In HTML5 <i> tag has new semantic meaning of 'alternate voice or mood' and <b> tag has the meaning of stylistically offset.

Example uses of <i> tag are - taxonomic designation, technical term, idiomatic phrase from another language, transliteration, a thought, ship names in western texts. Such as -

<p><i>I hope this works</i>, he thought.</p>

Example uses of <b> tag are keywords in a document extract, product names in a review, actionable words in an interactive text driven software, article lead.

The following example paragraph is stylistically offset from the paragraphs that follow it.

<p><b class="lead">The event takes place this upcoming Saturday, and over 3,000 people have already registered.</b></p>

<em> and <strong> had the meaning of emphasis and strong emphasis in HTML4. But in HTML5 <em> means stressed emphasis and <strong> means strong importance.

In the following example there should be a linguistic change while reading the word before ...

<p>Make sure to sign up <em>before</em> the day of the event, September 16, 2016</p>

In the same example we can use the <strong> tag as follows ..

<p>Make sure to sign up <em>before</em> the day of the event, <strong>September 16, 2016</strong></p>

to give importance on the event date.

MDN Ref:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/b

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/i

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/em

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/strong

Answer 11

As others have said <b> and <i> are explicit (i.e. "make this text bold"), whereas <strong> and <em> are semantic (i.e. "this text should be emphasised").

In the context of a modern web-browser, it's difficult to see the difference (they both appear to produce the same result, right?), but think about screen readers for the visually impaired. If a screen-reader came across an <i> tag, it wouldn't know what to do. But if it comes across a <em> tag, it knows that whatever is within should be emphasised to the listener. And therein you get the practical difference.

Answer 12

<b> and <i>, having no actual semantic meaning (like @splattne pointed out) was true, a long time ago. In modern HTML5 (<!DOCTYPE html>) they do have meaning. Check out the following links.

Semantic meaning (from MDN)

• <b>: Bring Attention To element

  • Keywords in a summary
  • product names.

<p>Here at company XYZ, we use <b>HTML</b> and <b>Javascript</b>.</p>

• <i>: Idiomatic Text element
  • Alternative voice or mood
  • Taxonomic designations (such as the genus and species "Homo sapiens")
  • Idiomatic terms from another language (such as "et cetera")
  • Technical terms

<p>I <i>did</i> tell him, to arrive on time for the meeting.</p>

<b> vs. <strong>

It may help to realize that both are valid and semantic elements in HTML5 and that it's a coincidence that they both have the same default styling (boldface) in most browsers (although some older browsers actually underline <strong>). Each element is meant to be used in certain types of scenarios, and if you want to bold text for decoration, you should instead actually use the CSS font-weight property. source

<i> vs. <em>

The <em> element represents stress emphasis of its contents, while the <i> element represents text that is set off from the normal prose. source

My 2 cents

I personaly prefer <b> and <i> over <strong> and <em>.

They are shorter, and their semantic meaning just makes sense, from a developer point of view too. I have no idea if todays screen readers can work with them. If not, I think they will eventually. A18n is a difficult topic, I just follow the lead of documentation. MDN says I can use them, so I do.

Answer 13

I use both <strong> and <b>, actually, for exactly the reasons mentioned in this thread of responses. There are times when bold-facing some text simply looks better, but it isn't, necessarily, semantically more important than the rest of the sentence. Here's an example from a page I'm working on right now:

"Retrieves <strong>all</strong> books about <b>lacrosse</b>."

In that sentence, the word "all" is very important, and "lacrosse" less so--I merely wanted it bold because it represents a search term, so I wanted some visual separation. If you're viewing the page with a screen reader, I really don't think it needs to go out of the way to emphasize the word "lacrosse".

I would tend to imagine that most web developers use one of the other, but both are fine--<b> is most definitely not deprecated, as some people have claimed. For me, it's just a fine line between visual appeal and meaning.

Answer 14

As the others have stated, the difference is that <b> and <i> hardcode font styles, whereas <strong> and <em> dictate semantic meaning, with the font style (or speaking browser intonation, or what-have-you) to be determined at the time the text is rendered (or spoken).

You can think of this as a difference between a “physical” font style and a “logical” style, if you will. At some later time, you may wish to change the way <strong> and <em> text are displayed, say, by altering properties in a style sheet to add color and size changes, or even to use different font faces entirely. If you've used “logical” markup instead of hardcoded “physical” markup, then you can simply change the display properties in one place each in your style sheet, and then all of the pages that reference that style sheet get changed automatically, without ever having to edit them.

Pretty slick, huh?

This is also the rationale behind defining sub-styles (referenced using the style= property in text tags) for paragraphs, table cells, header text, captions, etc., and using <div> tags. You can define physical representation for your logical styles in the style sheet, and the changes are automatically reflected in the web pages that reference that style sheet. Want a different representation for source code? Redefine the font, size, weight, spacing, etc. for your "code" style.

If you use XHTML, you can even define your own semantic tags, and your style sheet would do the conversions to physical font styles and layouts for you.

Answer 15

For text bold using <b> tag

For text important using <strong> tag

For text italic style using <i> tag

For emphasized text using <em> tag

Answer 16

Q: Difference between strong, b, bold, em, i?

Ans: These are inline properties.

Strong: It is used to show text bold or highlight it semantically.

Bold or b: This bold tag is just offset text conventionally styled in bold.

em: <em> tag semantically emphasizes the important word.

i : <i> tag just offset text conventionally styled in italic.

note: you should use <strong></strong> and <em></em> tags their meaningful names which tell about the type of content. Semantic tags are also helpful for SEO.

Answer 17

Use them only if using CSS style classes is for any reason unconvinient or impossible (like blog systems, allow only some tags to use in posts and eventually embedded styles). Another reason is support for very old browsers (some mobile devices?) or primitive search engines (that give points for <b> or <strong> tags, instead of analysing CSS styles).

If you can define CSS styles, use them.

Answer 18

<b> and <i> should be avoided because they describe the style of the text. Instead, use <strong> and <em> because that describes the semantics (the meaning) of the text.

As with all things in HTML, you should be thinking not about how you want it to look, but what you actually mean. Sure, it might just be bold and italics to you, but not to a screen reader.

Answer 19

"They have the same effect. However, XHTML, a cleaner, newer version of HTML, recommends the use of the <strong> tag. Strong is better because it is easier to read - its meaning is clearer. Additionally, <strong> conveys a meaning - showing the text strongly - while <b> (for bold) conveys a method - bolding the text. With strong, your code still makes sense if you use CSS stylesheets to change what the methods of making the text strong is.

The same goes for the difference between <i> and <em> ".

Google dixit:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_HTML_tags_b_and_strong

Answer 20

You should generally try to avoid <b> and <i>. They were introduced for layouting the page (changing the way how it looks) in early HMTL versions prior to the creation of CSS, like the meanwhile removed font tag, and were mainly kept for backward compatibility and because some forums allow inline HTML and that's an easy way to change the look of text (like BBCode using [i], you can use <i> and so on).

Since the creation of CSS, layouting is actually nothing that should be done in HTML anymore, that's why CSS has been created in the first place (HTML == Structure, CSS == Layout). These tags may as well vanish in the future, after all you can just use CSS and span tags to make text bold/italic if you need a "meaningless" font variation. HTML 5 still allows them but declares that marking text that way has no meaning.

<em> and <strong> on the other hand only says that something is "emphasized" or "strongly emphasized", it leaves it completely open to the browser how to render it. Most browsers will render em as italic and strong as bold as the standard suggests by default, but they are not forced to do that (they may use different colors, font sizes, fonts, whatever). You can use CSS to change the behavior the way you desire. You can make em bold if you like and strong bold and red, for example.

Answer 21

HTML Formatting Elements:

HTML also defines special elements for defining text with a special meaning. HTML uses elements like <b> and <i> for formatting output, like bold or italic text.

HTML Bold and Strong Formatting:

The HTML <b> element defines bold text, without any extra importance.

<b>This text is bold</b>

The HTML <strong> element defines strong text, with added semantic "strong" importance.

<strong>This text is strong</strong>

HTML Italic and Emphasized Formatting:

The HTML <i> element defines italic text, without any extra importance.

<i>This text is italic</i>

The HTML <em> element defines emphasized text, with added semantic importance.

<em>This text is emphasized</em>

Answer 22

First, never use any of them if you want to style the text, to represent a design decision. You should use CSS for that.

‍♂️ Don't do this

<article>
  <h1>Illa videamus, quae a te de amicitia dicta sunt.</h1>
  <b>John Doe, 23 March 2023</b>

  <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suam denique cuique naturam esse ad vivendum ducem. <mark>Venit ad extremum;</mark> <a href="http://loripsum.net/" target="_blank">Quo igitur, inquit, modo?</a> Certe, nisi voluptatem tanti aestimaretis. </p>

  <ul>
    <li>Quae fere omnia appellantur uno ingenii nomine, easque virtutes qui habent, ingeniosi vocantur.</li>
    <li>Transfer idem ad modestiam vel temperantiam, quae est moderatio cupiditatum rationi oboediens.</li>
    <li>Ergo in utroque exercebantur, eaque disciplina effecit tantam illorum utroque in genere dicendi copiam.</li>
  </ul>
</article>

B doesn't stand for Bold anymore, I doesn't stand for Italic and U doesn't stand for underline. Do not think of these as your word processor buttons. The initials are left over from early Web standards. Nowadays, their meanings are:

• <b>: The Bring Attention To element
• <i>: The Idiomatic Text element
• <u>: The Unarticulated Annotation (Underline) element

Funky names. They had to keep the initials somehow.

These elements do have a semantic meaning, albeit a weaker one, and are not deprecated. They are used to simply set apart some text from the surrounding text.

Getting back to the example:

This is semantic HTML

cite {
  font-weight: bold;
  font-style: normal; /* we override the browser styling here, to make it look like the previous example */
}

<article>
  <h1>Illa videamus, quae a te de amicitia dicta sunt.</h1>
  <cite>John Doe, 23 March 2023</cite>

  <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suam denique cuique naturam esse ad vivendum ducem. <mark>Venit ad extremum;</mark> <a href="http://loripsum.net/" target="_blank">Quo igitur, inquit, modo?</a> Certe, nisi voluptatem tanti aestimaretis. </p>

  <ul>
    <li>Quae fere omnia appellantur uno ingenii nomine, easque virtutes qui habent, ingeniosi vocantur.</li>
    <li>Transfer idem ad modestiam vel temperantiam, quae est moderatio cupiditatum rationi oboediens.</li>
    <li>Ergo in utroque exercebantur, eaque disciplina effecit tantam illorum utroque in genere dicendi copiam.</li>
  </ul>
</article>

They produce the same visual result, but their semantics are different. Bolding the article information is a design decision. (also, the <cite> element is another semantic tag - it indicates the source of the content)

Additionally, these tags can be styled using CSS - look at the examples from MDN to see some potential styles.

The <strong> and <em> tags produce the same visual result by default in most browsers, but this is just a coincidence.

They have a different semantic meaning. While the <b>, <i>, and <u> tags simply set the text apart, the <strong> and <em> tags are used to create emphasis. This represents more than just setting some text apart, instead it marks it as important. For screen readers, it usually changes the tone as well. As you might suppose, the <strong> tag indicates a stronger level of emphasis.

• <em>: The Emphasis element
• <strong>: The Strong Importance element

Yes, I have totally seen <strong> to be styled as underlined in many places, which is totally valid, semantic HTML.

Finally, here are some examples to help you decide:

.note {
  background-color: #ffff0080;
}

<article>
  Humans (<i>Homo sapiens</i>) are the most widespread species of primate.<br>
  <i>Around the World in Eighty Days</i> was one of Jules Verne's most notable works.
  <div class="note">
    In these examples, I used the <code>&lt;i&gt;</code> tag to indicate text that should be simply set apart - you wouldn't intonate it when reading the above sentences aloud.
  </div>
</article>
<article>
  This is <em>urgent</em>. The deadline is in <em>one week</em>.<br>
  Linux Mint is <em>widely praised</em> for its user-friendly interface and stability.
  <div class="note">
    In these examples, I used the <code>&lt;em&gt;</code> tag instead, to indicate a text of particular importance.
  </div>
</article>

Of course, these examples also apply to <b> or <strong>.

Answer 23

<strong> and <em> are abstract (which is what people mean when they say it's semantic). <b> and <i> are specific ways of making something "strong" or "emphasized"

Analogy:

Both <strong> is to <b> and <em> is to <i>

as

"vehicle" is to "jeep"

Answer 24

In HTML Lang, these two tags are used as follows:

simple text this is test text normal text



simple text this is important textwith normal text

The major diversity between these two HTML tags is that bold makes text only visually look bold, while strong also symbolism hit the respective text as essential and indicates that it is a clear word or text section.

This difference is due to the fact that HTML code differentiates between symbolism and physical visual html tags. While the earlier refer to the meaning of the relevant areas, the latter merely define the optical display in browsers.

Answer 25

We use the <strong> tag for text which has high priority for SEO purposes like product name, company name etc, while <b> simple makes it bold.

Similarly, we use <em> for text which has high priority for SEO, while <i> to make the text simply italic.