Question

I was just wondering if it’s a good idea to do this.
For example if you want to create round-cornered tabs using CSS, you would need a structure like this:

<li> <a href="..."> <span> Tab </span> </a> </li>
...

then you put the left tab corner background on the link tag and the right one the span (maybe it’s a bad example, because you could use the list tag to avoid the span, but you get my point :).

So, what if I used <b> instead of <span>, because it’s shorter? Would it cause problems with certain browsers, or search engines?

Answer 1

The tags have semantical meaning to the document. Indeed, a search engine interprets <b> in another way than <span>.

My five cents: Use the correct tags in first place, and optimize the size of the page source by using tags with shorter names in like 100’th place.