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CSS Framework Basics Prototyping with Bootstrap Adding a Dropdown Menu and Glyphicons

Miguel Agawin
Miguel Agawin
3,211 Points
Posted by Miguel Agawin
Miguel Agawin
3,211 Points

<b> tag for glyphs

How come the <b> tag is used for glyph icon fonts? Is this conventional? (Using <p> doesn't change thickness.) And how come it can't be selected on the front end with the cursor? Thanks!

1 Answer

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

tl;dr - Bootstrap did that for a while until they changed their minds in bootstrap 3.

<b> and <i> are no longer used for bold and italics with that change some people mistakenly thought that <b> and <i> were deprecated. Others knew better but decided it was ok to play fast and loose with semantics anyway.

I've heard 2 common justifications for this practice:

  1. <i> and <b> are 3 characters shorter than <span>
  2. The <i> makes them think of the i in icon

Neither view is supported by the spec, but web browsers will render most anything regardless of the semantics. Similarly, you can use replace all of your <span>s with <div>s and it will render just fine, however it won't be valid markup.