HTML <b> element

The <b> element draws attention to a span of text without giving it extra importance, stress emphasis, or a different voice. It is a quiet attention marker.

Browsers normally display <b> in bold. CSS can change this appearance without changing its purpose. If bold text is needed purely as part of a visual design, the CSS font-weight property can be applied to the element that already contains the text.

Useful cases include keywords in a summary, product names in a review, or the opening sentence of an article. In the lesson summary below, the marked keywords help the reader quickly identify the subjects covered. They give the reader small visual handles without asserting that those words carry extra importance.

The <b> element is different from <strong>. If the text is important, serious, or urgent, <strong> is the better fit. If the text merely needs to catch the eye, <b> may be suitable.

It is also different from <em>. The <em> element changes the stress of a sentence. The <b> element does not tell the reader to stress the word when reading the sentence aloud.

Attributes: GLOBALS.

Typical layout:
<p>
  This lesson introduces
  <b>selectors</b> and
  <b>inheritance</b>.
</p>

Visual representation: