15: Marking up textual content in HTML

One of the most important things you can do in HTML is structure plain, basic paragraphs of text, and this article shows you how. It covers the difference between block and inline elements, and basic HTML constructs like paragraphs, quotes, preformatted text, and emphasis.

( Read the article )

A small error: under first chapter "Space", h3 will never be interpreted as h1, regardless the number of white-space charachters

The "View Source" link, which is refered in the Introduction, is actually "View live examples" in the rest of the article.

Presentational elements—never use these

I do not see this as anything but the authors own bias. Is there a good reason *never* to use b, i, small, big? Sometimes the entire content of your post may be aggregated by feed demons (including html) for readers which support html (which there are plently of).

These tags are not deprecated, you are free to use them but should not rely on them when using css (reset them to be styless as spans and then re-style them to avoid browser incompatibility).

One very big problem in that section of the article is how the author makes it sound like all the mentioned are deprecated! by not providing any distinction in his listing. The hole concept of presentation tags being wrong is flawed as well, what do you think the <div> and <span> are; are they not presentation tags?

I too disagree strongly with the complete dismissal of, in particular, the bold and italic tags—by the W3C as well as by the article author—and I agree strongly with the argument mentioned that the italic tag should be used for vehicle names, titles of feature- or novel-length works, taxonomic species and genera, and such. When I use the bold and italic tags, I want those exact things, not some vague, protean “emphasis” or “strong”. In fact, I even disagree with the very existence of a “strong” tag, particularly when used for additional emphasis, as I feel it inculcates bad habits.

According to the Chicago Manual—and the education I received in school—it is incorrect to use boldface for emphasis at any time. In particular, boldface should not be used to indicate additional emphasis within an italic passage. For that, the correct procedure is to revert to roman. I grant that, sometimes, this can result in ambiguity, but the usual response of an editor is to recommend recasting the passage to remove the ambiguity.

Programmers and engineers seem to have certain consistent writing tics, and this is one of them. Unfortunately, because HTML and the Web were invented by an engineer for the use of engineers, those tics became institutionalized and have begun to affect the rest of the population.

The CSS weight and style tags are useful alternatives, though I feel they add unnecessary complication, and I grant that screen readers may be an issue, though I would argue that if a screen reader has a problem with a tag, that problem is a bug that needs to be fixed.

Now that I have that off my chest, I must say I find the series overall to be clear and useful. Some of the early articles, when dealing with typographical matters, tend to be a little oversimplified or a bit misleading, but when dealing with Web-specific topics, they are excellent.