This challenge is *not* dumb. But it is confusing.

Right, I get that, but the point is that there is almost no case in which we would do this as in-line CSS rather than using the CSS stylesheet. I work in the software industry, specifically in web development and in-line CSS is generally considered a big no-no.

Styling in HTML at all is basically a noob move in the industry. I'm not saying it's not possible or not worth knowing, but it's generally not used.

If I understood correctly, <strong> wasn't created to use as inline CSS but rather for eReaders, among a few other reasons.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/271743/whats-the-difference-between-b-and-strong-i-and-em

Hi Chris

Using <strong> isn't inline CSS, it's marking the text as having a different mood/voice/importance to the text around it. It adds semantic meaning and is correct to use where appropriate. Similarly, using <em> for emphasized text is also good practice.

Totally agree the knowledge is useful if you ever run into it; the point is the challenge is unnecessarily hard for a person like myself who already knows HTML and CSS fairly well, with little to no purpose in the difficulty from a learning standpoint.

And you'll almost never use a WYSIWYG editor in the real world if you're actually working in the software industry. Some people consider WordPress a WYSIWYG, but even so you would use CSS not HTML for this styling.

The actual lesson doesn't use the <strong> tag and focuses on very little styling. The old-school method of making text bold doesn't work as an answer and I didn't even think to use strong because I wouldn't even use strong in CSS; I'd use a font-weight or actually call bold.

This would be very confusing for a person who didn't know HTML at all because it's not actually discussed in the lesson. Confusion as a challenge doesn't make for good learning.

edit - I'll change the title, too, btw. It was out of frustration; not fair.

I get it Chris, it is poorly worded. It would of been better to use strong instead of bold.

They do talk about using the <strong> tag in a lesson a few back, were they mention it has a "bold" effect.

Using <strong> adds more meaning to the HTML file. The default styling is to make this bold, to attempt imply that meaning visually. You can override the browser default styling however you wish (as with any other element). Semantic HTML refers to marking up your code to accurately reflect the nature of the content.

Using tables to layout HTML pages used to be common practice, but it was not semantically accurate as an entire website is not tabular data. Similarly, <b> gives no additional importance to text, whereas <strong> has a defined meaning in HTML. Accurately marking up your HTML allows it to be understood more correctly by the devices reading/displaying it.

If you had a paragraph and you wanted highlight certain words/phrases how would you do so without additional markup?

<p>This is a paragraph. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing
 elit. Iure, neque aperiam exercitationem beatae.</p>

Typically in CSS you could only style the entire paragraph above (i.e. make the entire paragraph bold, red, whatever). You could select individual words/phrase by using additional elements, e.g. wrapping them in <i>, <b>, <strong>, <em>, <span>, but how do you decide which? You pick the one that most accurately defines the meaning of the word you are choosing to style differently.

Which has more meaning?

Example 1:

<style>
  .important {
    font-weight: bold;
  }
  .emphasized {
    font-style: italic;  
  }
</style>

<p>This is a paragraph. Lorem ipsum <span class="important">dolor 
sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit</span>. Iure, neque 
<span class="emphasized">aperiam</span> exercitationem beatae.</p>

Example 2:

<p>This is a paragraph. Lorem ipsum <strong>dolor sit amet, 
consectetur adipisicing elit</strong>. Iure, neque <em>aperiam</em>
 exercitationem beatae.</p>

In the first example the browser will simply display the text with the styles you have given it, it has no additional meaning to a machine other than it is a paragraph. You have human recognizable class names, which would show your intention to someone reading the code, but it has no meaning in HTML.

The second example can have more of the meaning interpreted by a device because semantic markup has been used to show the intention of the text.

Edit: added some line breaks in the code examples to try and make it more readable without scrolling sideways.