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Difference between <strong> and <em>

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Maxwell # Posted yesterday
What's the difference between these two tags? Hello everyone,

I read on the tutorial http://www.siteraw.com/html-css/how-to-create-a-website/organize-your-text that the <strong>, <em> and <mark> tags can highlight the text.

On the other hand I don't really understand the difference. Would anyone have additional explanations? What is the most used tag?

Thank you for your help
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Digital # Posted yesterday
Digital One is for emphasis, the other is for strong emphasis.

There is no precise definition of what constitutes "strong" emphasis or how it differs from its regular counterpart.

I personally use <strong> when I want to emphasis one or two words in a sentence, and <em> when I want the whole sentence or quote to be highlighted.
ParkerW # Posted two hours ago
ParkerW Hello,

<strong>, <em>, and <mark> tags are used by search engines to locate important words.

Be careful not to confuse them with the <i> and <b> tags. These have no semantic value, they just indicate a text formatting.

The tags <strong> and <em> are almost identical, the former emphasizes the text more strongly than the other.

And <mark> is a "new" tag from HTML5 but still little used.
Giovanni # Posted one hour ago
Giovanni The usage of bold for words that you want to stand out and italic for emphasised words, those that you don't need to highlight that much, is pretty commonplace in publishing.

Don't know how much of that translated to web development.
Westboro # Posted 37 minutes ago
Westboro Expanding on Digital's point: <b>, <i> and the rest of their ilk were added to HTML by people who didn't understand the purpose of the language and the fact that its tags were for the semantics of the text. As a result a whole bunch of ludicrous ill-considered and ill-designed tags (<blink> anyone? <frame>?) were added that muddied up the HTML scene badly up until xHTML 1.0 and HTML 5, though we still have to live with the consequences today.

A prime example is what happens with the <strong> and <em> tags. There is no reason to have to tags do the same thing, it was just a leftover from the <b> and <i> era.

As an aside, contrary to what you read here and there on the web, <b> and <i> have not been deprecated in HTML5. They still have semantic meaning.
Reikos # Posted 5 minutes ago
Reikos According to the W3 docs, strong does not indicate emphasis but importance, whereas em is for emphasis exclusively.

Of course, since they don't define either "emphasis" or "importance" we are back to square one regarding the use of these tags.

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