You're fine, BB. Don't worry about it.

There's nothing wrong with figuring out how strong your emphasis is by whether you would boldface or italicize it. Sighted folks who do a lot of writing are wired to do that.

The accessibility problems arise when everything that is bold or italic for any reason at all is marked with the same tags. Your blogpost titles, for example. They aren't strongly emphasized, even though they're visually bold, so you don't want to mark them up with strong. They're bold for another reason -- their blogpost-title-ness.

I was going to post this clarification to CavLec, but textartisan.com seems to have been knocked offline. Yay.

Whether or not the HTML spec dictates that we ugly things, the reality is that the standards are just that: standards. As Nielsen notes repeatedly, when a design element has become standard, it is the preferred solution simply because it is the standard. Is bolding more aesthetically pleasing than underlining? Possibly. If you watch actual users actually surfing, 99 out of 100 will not automatically think to click on a bolded word, while they will know to click on an underlined word (which of course becomes a problem when you need to underline something, hence the complementary standard of a link being #0000ff. I would argue that you are coding the way the standard intended. If you want to produce visually compelling content, you might want to do a lot of assault on the standards. If your writing is the most important aspect, then as long as your design is visually comfortable for the average user and doesn't break reasonably current browsers, then you're doing everything right.

Yes, I know, using the word content is evil. Just because marketroids and clueless media have debased the word, it really does accurately describe what we all write/draw/sing/create/produce/whatever. Deal with it.

Doh, I hadn't read Dorothea's post yet. Ensuring accessibility is important, and if you do code to the standards you should be alright. One of these days I'm going to get around to grabbing a screenreader for verification, however.

Rev is right about links and underlining vis-a-vis usability, by the way. For me, it's a case of markup snobbishness and typography snobbishness clashing badly. *grin* I compromise by bolding all links and underlining active ones.

Your ponderings go to the very nature of publishing on the web in two ways-

First: What is the purpose of your website? Is it for for personal use with limited traffic, or are you trying to supply the widest possible audience with important information?

If the site is personal- hey, it's yours, do your thing. Sloppy markup will most likely be forgiven by friends and relatives who might not even know what "markup" is.

If the site is to be more universal, then your success with maximizing target acceptance will be ensured by spending time developing and continuing to use proper markup and document structure. Everybody can read (hear, absorb) what you have written when it is compliant with standards which are being implemented in browser creation (to varying degrees, but it is increasing).

Second: I mentioned the idea of document structure above. That is to use tags that have semantic symbology built in. For example heading tags, starting with h1 going down through h4 represent different levels of importance like in an outline. Sure you could start with h4 and go down to h1 because for some reason you wanted the last smallest point to be displayed largest, but then the logical structure of the flow of your ideas is working at cross-purposes to the purpose of the tags you have used, ie. the least important point is wrapped in the tag that represents the greatest importance.

This is important not only to alternative browsers like audible readers, which would be confused by the misuse of the h1 tag, but to enable you to transform (again, to varying degrees) what you have written from ASCII text into acutal data. That is, paragraphs are inside p tags, section headings progress logically from the top, h1, to the bottom of pontifical hierarchy with h4.

Such separation also makes it far easier to totally change the whole look of the site by changing your CSS without breaking things because what you say is independent of how the browser displays it.

It basically boils down to a philosophical decision.

Do you want to make it "work correctly" with the maximum flexibility, or do you just want to get pixels displayed in a manner that looks the way you want it to with the least hassle on your part?

(perhaps I should have emailed this- it turned out pretty long... I hope this space I've taken has been filled with ideas that are useful and not already old-hat)

BTW, Bb, your site is actually pretty clean. I'm going to go home and play with it tonight, see what I can do with it. I bet it won't take me long to reproduce it (not pixel-for-pixel, but reasonably close) sans table.

I'll let you know what I come up with, of course.

I use the word _content_ Rev, but then, I'm contrary.

Roger, good points. The only length restriction to these comments is that if it's book length, I share royalities.

Dorothea, you are a very very kind person but please don't use your free time - unless you find this process fun, in which case, thanks!

I'd like to claim at least partial credit for the blue and the gray. I did it from republican motives since the default link colors on a white background so strongly resemble the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack -- an action at odds with my reputation, since effete snobs would usually be expected to support royalty.

True - I would have assumed your preference would be the royal purple and the elite pink.

I admit to being both anal and front end ... odd, you'd think it would be anal and backend, though methinks I'm being too literal...

Anal and Proud, say it loud!

hmmm...