Bold vs. Strong

I'm surprised that there is so much discussion on the matter. And now I add another comment.

To all that have said that it is up to preference, are wrong. Well, that is if your goal is being a good coder.

<b> is depreciated in both XHTML 1.1 and HTML 4. That means don't use it! Yes, browsers will still render it correctly but that is because there are so many old pages (and bad coders) left on the web.

Someone mentioned above that screen readers will read <strong> tags differently. That is what semantic code is about. The purpose of markup is to add meaning to your content. Period. End of story. Everything visual ought be done with CSS.

Use <strong> and <em> for strong and emphasized text. Don't use <b> and <i>.