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HTML HTML Forms HTML Mastery

Stefan Osorio
Stefan Osorio
16,419 Points
Posted by Stefan Osorio
Stefan Osorio
16,419 Points

Task 4 of 8, strong vs. bold

The task says "Add a paragraph tag that has some text inside of it bolded." The "strong" tag is accepted as a solution, "b" is not. But as far as i know, "strong" is used to denote "strong emphasis", while "b" is used to make text bold without semantic implications.

So... wouldn't the latter be more appropriate, considering that the task specifically calls for "bold text" without mentioning emphasis/importance/semantics?

2 Answers

Joel Rivera
Joel Rivera
29,401 Points
Joel Rivera
Joel Rivera
29,401 Points

Hello Stefan,

Mozilla has a great explanation on the strong vs bold issue

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

I would think that when someone refers to making a piece of text bold they might often mean strong. It's common since we tend to think of text that is darker and stands out as being bolded.

When it comes to SEO its not supposed to make a difference. Check out Matt Cutts from Google talking about the topic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awto_wCeOJ4

Hope it helps.

Matthew Underhill
Matthew Underhill
20,363 Points
Matthew Underhill
Matthew Underhill
20,363 Points

Hi Stefan,

The questions on treehouse can sometimes be a little misleading, but if you think about the topic carefully (HTML) you are writing markup to create the semantic structure of a web page. Whenever you want to alter the way an element looks, CSS should be used instead. HTML should never be used with the intention of altering the way an element appears.

The <strong> element emphasis a piece of text as being important and the browsers default stylesheet makes it appear bold. The <b> tag is used simply to change the look of the text, NOT its actual emphasis. It isn't as semantic anymore to use the <b> tag as it is used for presentation purposes only, and not for describing the content nested inside of it.

Hope this helps and makes sense a little more, Matt