HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Replace b with strong or CSS
Change all
b
elements into
strong
elements or
span
elements.
I'm <b>very</b> certain of this.
The triangle inequality states that
||<b>x</b> + <b>y</b>|| ||<b>x</b>|| + ||<b>y</b>||
I'm <strong>very</strong> certain of this.
The triangle inequality states that
||<span class='vector'>x</span>
+ <span class='vector'>y</span>||
||<span class='vector'>x</span>||
+ ||<span class='vector'>y</span>||
Motivation
The
b
element is not allowed in XHTML strict. It describes appearance, not meaning, and it does not work in
non-GUI browsers such as Lynx or screen readers. It should be replaced by more descriptive semantic markup.
Usually that's a
strong
element, but on occasion it's something else.
Potential Trade-offs
Very old browsers may not recognize the CSS rules. However, even the first and buggiest third-generation
browsers that supported CSS at all supported this much. All browsers back to Mosaic 1.0 support the
strong
element.
Mechanics
Simple validation with the strict DTD will locate all the
b
elements. Alternatively, a quick search for
</b>
will find
them all.
If you're willing to assert that the only reason you ever used the
b
element was to emphasize something, you
can just replace these with
strong
tags.
However, many sites use the
b
element as a fairly presentational effect, without meaning a whole lot. If this is
the case, replace it with CSS. For example, change this:
<a href="72.html"><b>Next Page</b></a>
into this:
<a style="font-weight: bold" href="72.html">Next page</a>
You may wish to use a
class
or
id
attribute so that you can place the style information in an external
stylesheet instead:
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