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Day 70 of 100DaysOfSpec, strong, small, and s elements

I am reading and taking notes on the HTML specifications for 100 days as part of #The100DayProject. Read the initial intent/backstory. I am a Microsoft employee but all opinions, comments, etc on this site are my own. I do not speak on behalf of my employer, and thus no comments should be taken as representative of Microsoft's official opinion of the spec. Subsections not listed below were read without comment.

Currently reading in 4.5 Text-level semantics.

4.5.3 The strong element

“The strong element represents strong importance, seriousness, or urgency for its contents.”

  • Nested strong elements increases “importance”.
  • Using strong does not change a sentence’s meaning.

4.5.4 The small element

“The small element represents side comments such as small print.”

  • Use cases: “disclaimers, caveats, legal restrictions, or copyrights”, also licensing requirements or attribution
  • Not to be used just to “de-emphasize” something: a very common mistake, I’d think.
  • Only for short amounts of text.
  • It could make semantic sense to wrap a small element in a strong element, which would be important fine print (“read the fine print!”).

4.5.5 The s element

“The s element represents contents that are no longer accurate or no longer relevant.”

If you wanted to mark up a document edit that is a deletion, you’d use the del element instead.

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