>><b> is not deprecated, it just has no semantic value and in the fight
>>to get people to markup their content semantically instead of >>visually, <b> and <i> became clear targets. Unfortunately, this means >>that many people think they should use <strong> and <em> when they >>really should use <b> and <i>. It's similar to the people who bend >>over backwards in order to put tabular data in some sort of floating >>list construct, just because they think that CSS-styled markup should >>not have the table tag. Here is a W3C Working Draft that addresses <b> and <i>: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-HTML-TECHS/ "The em and strong elements were designed to indicate structural emphasis that may be rendered in a variety of ways (font style changes, speech inflection changes, etc.). The b and i elements were deprecated in HTML 4.01 and XHTML because they were used to create a specific visual effect." It is not difficult to keep presentation separate from content. Using style sheets does this nicely. As for tabular data, of course it should be displayed in a table. That is what the tag is for. Using tables for page layout, however, is a different story. Using tables to design Web pages is an accessibility nightmare. Our accessibility guys give presentations to developers demonstrating the problems that arise with tables-based layout. After they have had the opportunity to listen to what a screen reader "sees" most of them are more then willing to change their tables-based layout to a div-based layout. We are also able to help them get the very same layout without tables. Again, style sheets do the job. Julie Romanowski State Farm Insurance Company J2EE Engagement Team phone: 309-735-5248 cell: 309-532-4027 ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
