Subject: Not as far as I know
Author:
Posted on: 2022-06-05 17:15:05 UTC

Although this post made me curious: Where did em and strong come from?

I learned HTML in the late 2000s, as I recall. Or, like, 2011 at the latest. And at that time, most tutorials would tell you about b, i, etc, but not mention their cousins. "Better" tutorials and books would tell you that b and i and such were deprecated and you shouls be using em and strong instead, or even more specialized tags combined with css text-style because HTML wasn't really about determining how your document looked as expressing semantic intent (in theory, this is true, and it's a noble goal, but it doesn't reflect the way HTML is used in practice...). From this, I assumed that these tags were newer, introduced in HTML5 or XHTML or something, or maybe with the advent of CSS, which allowed for the display semantics of text to actually be customized by authors.

And it turns out that was wrong. Wildly wrong. em and strong both appear in RFC1866, which is the first official HTML spec, predating CSS (another fun sidenote, CSS is often cited as both a Microsoft technology and implicitly an act of aggression in the browser wars. Neither is true: CSS has been on the standards track for years by the time IE implemented it (which it did at or near the time it was fully standardized), was implemented in several experimental browsers prior, came from CERN, not Microsoft, and it was Netscape, not Microsoft, that introduced their own styling proposal with JSSS bare months before CSS was standardized. Netscape was plenty willing to play dirty. That's where JavaScript comes from). Additionally, b and i are not deprecated, or even entirely recommended to avoid, not even in the latest HTML5 spec.

There's no actual point to any of this.

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