strong?

I know <font< is going away and have always avoided it, but what's the story with using [b] instead of [b]? Seems like an extra 10 letters...

Any other tags being deprecated?

The HTML 4.01 spec doesn't deprecate the [b] tag as such. Though it has been suggested now for many years - at least four or five that people use 'styles' to format their text.

Rather than worry about deprecated tags, concentrate instead on using XHTML and CSS to create and format your pages. The time has come when browsers are starting to behave as they should and things work how you would expect them to.

http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/ offers a great introduction to the differences between XHTML and HTML

Likewise, http://www.w3schools.com/css/ is pretty good as a starting point to CSS.

i was looking over the XHTML 2.0 draft, and I did not see the [b] tag there.. Instead I only saw the [b] tag. So I take it that it is recommended to use over the b tag, as it will probably be deprecated in XHTML 2.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-inli...ine-textmodule

Perhaps the most interesting significance of the deprecation of these 'standard' tags is the effect on SEO. For example, some search engines recognise that words/text in bold (using [b]) have a higher importance. Since the search engines robot only takes into account the HTML and text content of a page, a move to CSS effectively removes these important indications.

My own tests with Google's bot indicated that it was only able to recognise bold text if [b] tags were used to markup the bold text. Neither [b], <span style="font-weight:bold"> or <span class="x"/id="x"> (with the class/id defined internally or externally) worked in the same way.

That's an interesting aspect of this I hadn't stopped to consider.

Although it should be noted that google does respond well to H1, H2 tags, etc and that these can be defined in a stylesheet as appearing differently to the default size - And also bold.

I don't know what is missing from Sirkents post, but I am guessing it is things like h1, h2, h3

I have a book site where I generated static pages with book titles in h1 tags and the author in h2. They are the first 2 items on the page and the SE's are loving in.

Redefining the tags in the stylesheet means that the text doesn't have to take up half the page either.

Interesting D3mon...

Google as far as I am concerned recognises and gives importance to [b] tags, as well as [b] tags. How long ago did you conduct this research?

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Rob - SEO Specialist
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Probably about 12 months ago now (when I first got into SEO).
Fair play to Google if they have updated their algorithms.

Although <strong > may now work, I'd be very suprised to see spiders/robots taking into account CSS styling when judging the importance of content, which kind of works against the prinicple of seperating content from style.

[b] will be deprecated, along with
. Anyone fancy a tutorial on converting to XHTML? If u want, I can certainly do one for yall.

Rather than reinvent the wheel with another XHTML tutorial why not just find a decent one already out there. For starters, you could have a peek at http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp

Or have a quick search using http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%2B...-8&hl=en&meta=

Just tried that search and w3schools was number one