Whether you’re new to Word 2007 or trying your hand at HTML coding, you probably should note that the terms bold and italics have been replaced. The new terms are strong and emphasis. Struggle as you might, you’ll need to get used to this new jargon.
I’d place blame on the Macintosh. Back in 1984, computer geeks knew little of typesetting. As the first widely-used graphical computer, the Mac set the tone: Mac engineers used the word font instead of typeface. Therefore the word font became what it is today. (Or maybe the engineers just copied some other engineer’s misuse of the term. Who knows?)
HTML is the formatting code used to create web pages. It’s really very simple; I explain the basics for bloggers and casual users in my Blogger’s Guide to HTML. Two of the key codes people like to use are <b> and </b> for bold on and bold off, and <i> and </i> for italics on, italics off. Those codes are easy to remember. (Well, providing that you also remember the “tag off” code.)
For about 10 years, however, the <b> and <i> codes have been replaced in HTML. The newer, preferred codes are <strong> and <em> (emphasis) and for bold and italics, respectively. Both work the same as the original <b> and <i> tags. In fact, you can still use <b> and <i>, but I’d recommend switching over to <strong> and <em> when you can remember to do so.
Why switch? Because the tides are turning that way.
For example, in Word 2007, Microsoft uses strong and emphasis in the Styles area as replacements for bold and italics. Yes, the B and I buttons can still be found on the Formatting part of the Ribbon. (The Ribbon. I still can’t get used to writing that.) But the Strong and Emphasis styles are preferred. That’s because, in the world of typesetting, bold and italics are fonts, not text attributes.
By using the terms strong and emphasis, you are now able to define exactly what bold or italic text can be. For example, in your document you may decide that the strong attribute really means not only darker but larger text as well. In Word 2007 or on a web page, that’s an easy thing to change with the strong attribute. It’s impossible to do so with bold. That’s the key reason behind the new terminology.
So bold and italics are still with us. You can use your formatting, in Word or in HTML, just as you always have. But keeping an eye toward the future, don’t neglect the strong and emphasis formats.
