<b> versus <strong>

[fray]

Hi,
Both the above appear to do the same thing to text on a web page.
Have I misunderstood their use?
Do Search engines view them differently?
Thanks

[hrethan]

According to http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/HTML:Element:strong

"It is often confusing to new developers why there are so many ways to express the same thing on a rendered website. Bold and Strong are perhaps one of the most common. Why use <strong></strong> vs <b></b> you have to type a whole lot more with strong and it produces the exact same result right?

Perhaps not, strong is a logical state, and bold is a physical state. Logical states separate presentation from the content, and by doing so allows for it to be expressed in many different ways, perhaps instead of rendering some text as bold you want to render it red, or a different size, or underlined, or whatever. It makes more sense to change the presentational properties of strong than it does bold. This is because of bold is a physical state, there is no separation of presentation and content, making bold do anything other than bold text would be confusing and illogical."

[pigplanet]

In English:

<b>The BOLD tag</b> is simply a way to make the font bold.
<strong>STRONG</strong> is a way to make text stand out in general. By default, this makes the font bold.
However, you can go into CSS and modify this:
strong { color:#f00; }
Now, <strong>STRONG</strong> makes the font bold AND red.
This would be useful if for example you have a paragraph that is bold
<b>For example, this paragraph is bold. Maybe it needs to be bold to fit the design. Anyways, using the <b>Bold</b> tags does nothing to differentiate the text. Using <strong>Strong</strong>, under normal circumstances also does nothing. However, if you use the modified CSS, <strong>Strong</strong> can be used to make the text stand out in another way. (by making it red)</b>

Make sense?