Just a quick question: as I’m figuring out HTML, I’ve learned that “<b></b>” will make the inner text bold, but why are we seeing “<strong>” being used these days? Is there a difference?

Dave’s Answer:

While you would think that something so rudimentary as the markup language for Web pages wouldn’t be a place where you’d find great controversy, in fact there are two different quite fervent camps in site design that are represented in this debate. What we’re talking about is whether markup should be functional or whether it should be presentation-based.

If you were on the functional side, you would say that when you’re writing content for online publication, you want to simply note how that element relates to the content overall. So “<cite>” for citations, “<a>” for anchor text (hypertext links), and so on. How it’s rendered, how the tool that the reader is using to view your content, is up to their tool’s preferences. Some users might prefer citations in yellow with a dark blue background, while others might want to simply have it underlined: it’s “up to the browser”.

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Human beings sometimes work with concepts and may use different words to express the same idea. This human intelligence is not easily mimicked by a computer which is digital. True or false, that is the way the computer sees it. For example the Title and the Heading of a blog are two distinct entities. People sometimes get confused between the two and call the headline the title of the blog post. This is incorrect. The title is what appears at the top of the screen: the heading is the headline that appears in the view window of the browser. As is discussed elsewhere, the simplest explanation is that Headlines are for humans, while titles are for robots.

Where it can get really complicated is where the same word is used with two quite distinct meanings. Unfortunately this has happened to one of the most important words relating to a web page: the description. One place the word description is used extensively is in the Open Directory Project or DMOZ. This site started off just over 10 years ago as GnuHoo, switching to NewHoo, before being acquired by Netscape. Being featured in the Open Directory Project provides a useful link for any site in gaining search engine visibility. In consequence many people have gone through the DMOZ submission process.

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