Question

Is using more than one

<strong> 

tag actually make the word stronger?

i.e. is

<strong><strong>abc</strong></strong>

stronger than

<strong>abc</strong>

?

I’m asking this because if you view the HTML source of the official website of North Korea,
http://www.korea-dpr.com/ you will see it has many strong tags. Is this supposed to be something like an IE hack?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Yes, you can nest strong tags and the more you nest, the stronger it becomes. Although I’d say beyond 2-3 nested is extraneous.

The relative level of importance of a
piece of content is given by its
number of ancestor strong elements;
each strong element increases the
importance of its contents.

Source: HTML 5 spec

Some modern user agents will apply font-weight:bolder; to strong, though since it’s already bold you won’t really notice a visual difference. If you want, you can apply a rule such as the % so nested strong elements become larger, as indicated in the other answer.

Some screen readers might dictate the word out more loudly.

Seems like JAWS/Window Eyes screen readers don’t indicate importance, according to this.