Watch that as well. The <i> and <b> tags are valid (except in some XHTML dialects) and are not interchangeable with <em> and <strong>. And don't forget <cite>, <var> and <dfn> either. There is more than one reason for text to be presented as italic or bold (by typographic convention), and emphasis is only one of them. On introducing a new term, you would use <dfn>; foreign words and phrases would use <i> with a lang attribute. It's all usually a jumble in a CMS (where the user entering the text is usually only concerned with the appearance), but if you're creating static pages or page fragments, it's best to keep in mind that the markup is metadata. (There is a lot of nineteenth-century literature that took on new meaning for me once I realized that half of the italicized words, which I assumed were emphasized, were just new imports that didn't "feel English" yet at the time.)
Watch that as well. The <i> and <b> tags are valid (except in some XHTML dialects) and are not interchangeable with <em> and <strong>. And don't forget <cite>, <var> and <dfn> either. There is more than one reason for text to be presented as italic or bold (by typographic convention), and emphasis is only one of them. On introducing a new term, you would use <dfn>; foreign words and phrases would use <i> with a lang attribute. It's all usually a jumble in a CMS (where the user entering the text is usually only concerned with the appearance), but if you're creating static pages or page fragments, it's best to keep in mind that the markup is metadata. (There is a lot of nineteenth-century literature that took on new meaning for me once I realized that half of the italicized words, which I assumed were emphasized, were just new imports that didn't "feel English" yet at the time.)