<strong> and <b> aren't same ?

[bigduke]

according to the W3C accessibility guideline the element STRONG is supposed to be a structrue element and B is supposed to be a presentation element. Aren't they the same and therefore presentation elements? or is it just how the browsers render <strong> that makes it "look" like a presentation element?

[hooperman]

They're not the same. 'Strong' relates to the meaning you are giving to html elements, whereas you could be bolding elements for any reason.

You would apply <strong> to something you wanted to stress, but you might apply <b> purely for presentation reasons.

[tetsuo shima]

Hi,
the <strong> tag is used for emphasis, just like the <em> tag. No matter how you want your output to look like (I'm talking style here), you use these tags to emphasize one or more words. If you just want a portion of your text to be bold, then you can use the <b> tag, which is very acceptable. You can also go the CSS way and style a <span> tag:

.bold{
    font-weight:bold;
}

<span class="bold">some words</span>

[bigduke]

so how does emphasizing affect content other than the rendering in the browser ? The screen readers lay more stress on this and perhaps even some SEO repercussions ?

[AutisticCuckoo]

A visual user agent may choose to represent <strong> by using a red background. It doesn't have to be bold.

An aural user agent (or some assistive technology on top of a browser, e.g., a screen reader) can 'render' <strong> by slowing down the speed of reading and/or increasing the volume. How do you 'render' <b> in speech?

[sonjay]

Yes, the main difference is for non-visual user-agents, such as screenreaders. A screenreader would completely ignore <b>, because it's presentational only, while a screenreader would (ideally) somehow emphasize <strong> because it's, well, strong.

Virtually every visual browser boldfaces <strong>, but there's nothing in the html spec defining that. A visual browser could make <strong> royal purple all uppercase, while <b> always means bold, regardless.

And of course you can use css to style either of those tags however you want. Just bear in mind that non-visual user-agents will only pay attention to strong, and not to b. In theory, anyway.

[tetsuo shima]

so how does emphasizing affect content other than the rendering in the browser ? The screen readers lay more stress on this and perhaps even some SEO repercussions ?

Words emphasized have more weight SEO wise. If you have a page optmized for some keywords, the <strong> and <em> tags are two tags you definitly wanna use around these keywords. Same goes for <hx> tags btw.

[xhtmlcoder]

Well, yes but that could be considered abusing semantics if you just littered the page with structural emphasis for the sake of trying to gain better SEO.

[bigduke]

Thank you so much for all your insight chaps ... really appreciate it

[tetsuo shima]

Well, yes but that could be considered abusing semantics if you just littered the page with structural emphasis for the sake of trying to gain better SEO.

Of course!