I understand, but honestly this is really not my problem. That's the problem of someone reading and writing non-Latin scripts. In my Latin scripts, I see bold and italic and underline all the time and obviously I need a way to mark these, since they have very well-defined textual semantics in the kind of script I'm working with. If these semantics don't apply to Japanese, for example, then just don't use <b> and <i> in Japanese? Make a <傍点> or <sideline> tag for Japanese that shows up in the Japanese version of Wordpress and other CMS's.
Why would someone writing English have to think about how bold text looks like in Japanese? That makes no sense.
Even for accessibility it makes no sense. As far as I know, screen readers don't even announce bold/italic/em/strong or them differently. And if they announced, I'd expect any italic text I ever write to be read out loud as "in italics..." not "in emphasis..."
I genuinely can not understand the thought process that went into creating these tags. It's like they completely ignored the idea that text as a medium has its own layer of semantics and tried to skip over it. But this is just my personal opinion. In the end the objective facts are that <em> and <strong> don't really do anything in the real world besides wasting more bytes than <i> and <b>, so there's exactly zero benefits in using them.
I really wish someone would prove me wrong, though, hence this thread.
Why would someone writing English have to think about how bold text looks like in Japanese? That makes no sense.
Even for accessibility it makes no sense. As far as I know, screen readers don't even announce bold/italic/em/strong or them differently. And if they announced, I'd expect any italic text I ever write to be read out loud as "in italics..." not "in emphasis..."
I genuinely can not understand the thought process that went into creating these tags. It's like they completely ignored the idea that text as a medium has its own layer of semantics and tried to skip over it. But this is just my personal opinion. In the end the objective facts are that <em> and <strong> don't really do anything in the real world besides wasting more bytes than <i> and <b>, so there's exactly zero benefits in using them.
I really wish someone would prove me wrong, though, hence this thread.