Mozilla thinks they are very cute

[ilzolende]

Element	Description
<b>	The HTML Bring Attention To element (<b>) is used to draw the reader's attention to the element's contents, which are not otherwise granted special importance.
<u>	The HTML Unarticulated Annotation Element (<u>) represents a span of inline text which should be rendered in a way that indicates that it has a non-textual annotation.

Some people naming things think they are very cute. Mozilla, you know that <b> stands for “bold” and <u> stands for “underline”. I know that <b> stands for “bold” and <u> stands for “underline”. You, reading this post right now, probably previously knew that <b> stands for “bold” and <u> stands for “underline”.

What's next, calling <i> the “Indicate distinction element”?

To be clear, I'm not actually mad at whoever renamed these things, and I get the reason why, but it does seem rather silly.

Comments

[zenolalia]

No, that's like... That's the legit name of the b and u elements in html now, not just at mozilla. The folks at the w3 consortium (the people who make html) are fuckin wild. But, hopefully this kind of thing will get people to properly format their text for screen readers one day. Eventually. In the far flung future. /sigh

[ilzolende]

Ah, so the w3 consortium did the thing. I don't know why we can't just have <b> and <u> be treated like, say, <font>? They don't seem to have the plethora of legitimate uses that <i> does. (The appropriate tag for a species name is not going to be <em>.)

And yeah, making things be nice for screen reader users is important.

[marahmarie]

I should brush up on this in The Google to be sure, but afaic recall <b>'s been deprecated in favor of <strong>, <u> isn't deprecated and <em> is now preferred over <i> for emphasis (and as I hand-code all my entries I ignore *all of the above* in favor of chosing the shortest codes for speed/simplicity - long live Quirks mode).

I think for species what might be looking for is <cite> (though checking Mozilla's page I see "and so forth" is the only cover there is for that, lol).