Question

Obviously, this is a bit of a “it depends” question, but what HTML element makes the most sense to provide the clearest meaning of “Hey, you, I think this is an important word!”?

I realize I could just use <b> tags, but that simply provides visual emphasis (unless, of course, I use Eric Meyer’s reset.css. Then you get nothing…). I am curious what would provide a better semantic meaning. So far my searches lead me to believe mark could make sense, especially if I wanted to query the page content later to extract keywords, but it feels like I’d be using the element incorrectly.

EDIT:

Per @Paul D. Waite’s suggestion, let me try to explain what I mean by “keyword.”

Let’s say I wrote a blog post or tutorial about how to, say, write a simple WPF application. When I reference language constructs, namespaces, classes, etc. I tend to use the <code> or <samp> tags (along with some monospace fonts to reinforce visually that I am making technical references). Now, if I wanted to emphasize a word or phrase, say “visual tree”, as a way of making sure the reader knows I think that was a term they should get used to hearing (or look for more information about), is a simple <strong> or <em> element really the best way to mark this up?

Hope this makes sense.

Answer 1

As per the spec, it looks like you want <strong>:

The strong element represents strong importance for its contents.

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-author-view/the-strong-element.html#the-strong-element

The section of the spec for <mark> even has an example of how <mark> and <strong> differ.

It really depends what you mean by “keyword”. Could you provide an example of the content you’re trying to mark up?

Edit: if you’re emphasising a word because it’s the defining instance of a term (i.e. you’re defining it in the same paragraph), then you can use the <dfn> tag.