Stop Turning “Avoid Because” Or “When Appropriate” Into “Never Use This”

This article was updated 10 Aug 2022 to better reflect modern norms. Things change.

Far too often in web development people turn good advice into bad practice; or worse misinterpret and twist the specification’s recommendations into “never ever do the alternative”. More often than not, the result is bloated code and the equivalent of slogging around a flaming hogshead.

In this way Mr. K will challenge the world!

For Example: In HTML

This comes up far far too often. Take four simple tags:

STRONG, EM, B and I

A simple example of this is how the <em> and <strong> tags should be used instead of <i> and <b> when their semantic meaning of “emphasis” and “more emphasis” is more grammatically appropriate. The past 20+ years I’ve heard all sorts of nonsense as folks magically transform that into “never use <b> and <i>”, with some going so far as to make up bald faced LIES about the bold and italic tags being deprecated. Anyone saying that has likely never even tried reading the HTML specifications.

HTML is supposed to be about semantics, saying what things are or would be in a professionally written document for structural or grammatical reasons. To that end all four of these tags have separate meanings and usage cases…