What is the difference between HTML tags b and strong?

Answer 1

The <B> tag always displays bold text. The <I> tag always displays italicized text. The <EM> tag is used to emphasize text. * The <Strong> tag is used to emphasize text in a stronger manner. * All four tags will work with major browsers and are part of the current standards for HTML and XHTML. Despite some people's insistence to the contrary, none of these tags have been deprecated.

* - Every browser views emphasis differently (some browsers will italicize it, bold it, or even use it in combination).

Answer 2

From the W3C site, regarding the two tags in question:

The i element now represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, a ship name, or some other prose whose typical typographic presentation is italicized. Usage varies widely by language.

(ref: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/diff/) This is specifically a difference in HTML5 compared to previous versions of HTML.

EM and STRONG are used to indicate emphasis ... The presentation of phrase elements depends on the user agent. Generally, visual user agents present EM text in italics and STRONG text in bold font. Speech synthesizer user agents may change the synthesis parameters, such as volume, pitch and rate accordingly.

(ref: http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/struct/text.html#edef-EM)

I: Renders as italic text style. (ref: http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/present/graphics.html#edef-I)

Notice that 'I' specifically renders text as italics, whereas 'EM' specifies emphasis which may or may not be rendered as italics. However, with the advent of CSS and stylesheets, both these tags can be superceded!

Answer 3

They have the same effect. However, XHTML, a cleaner, newer version of HTML, recommends the use of the <strong> tag. Strong is better beucase it is easier to read- it's 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 sunse 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>

Answer 4

There is a <b> tag, but no bold tag. You do have a <strong> tag. Visually the two tags do the exact same thing. There is a difference, in that anything inside <strong> tags is deemed more important and is picked up by search engines. So if you are bolding something and also want that to be an important word for a page when people are searching, then the <strong> tag is better to use. For bolding regular words, use <b> instead.