Editor: b=strong,i=em

[mcnesium]

This thing is around for a very long time. Approaches to report it, have been misunderstood [1] or affectively rejected [2]. Let me rephrase the problem real quick:

The quicktags toolbar provides both a b- and an i-button to markup the content. The b-button adds a <strong>- and an i-button adds an <em>-element.

The intention to this is clear: non-HTML-educated users just want the text to be bold or italic as they know it from Word or any other office tool and most of the time they do not care about valid HTML. As <b> and <i> had been deprecated in XHTML in favor of <strong> and <em> as semantically correct markup, those buttons consequently have been marked differently to what they do.

But: today we do HTML5 and here those tags do have a semantical meaning:

• <i> — was italic, now for text in an “alternate voice”, such as transliterated foreign words, technical terms, and typographically italicized text
• <b> — was bold, now for “stylistically offset” text, such as keywords and typographically emboldened text
• <em> — was emphasis, now for stress emphasis, i.e., something you’d pronounce differently
• <strong> — was for stronger emphasis, now for strong importance, basically the same thing (stronger emphasis or importance is now indicated by nesting)

Source: HTML5Doctor [3]

Today when people embold their content, regarding the HTML5 standard, most often <b> is actually what they want.

So here goes my bug report: make those buttons do <b> and <i> and provide a setting to additionally have <strong>- and <em>-buttons for interested users.

If you weren't about that rather compicated contribution politics, I'd already have filed a pull request. The corresponding files are wp-includes/js/quicktags.js to init the buttons and wp-includes/class-wp-editor.php to set the default quicktags-bar.

I would be very grateful if this issue would be taken care of.

[1] ​https://wordpress.org/support/topic/editor-turns-b-to-strong-and-i-to-em-where-is-the-code-responsible
[2] ​https://wordpress.org/support/topic/editor-turns-b-to-strong-and-i-to-em-where-is-the-code-responsible
[3] ​http://html5doctor.com/i-b-em-strong-element/

[mcnesium]

Actually I'd also like a <q>-element in the quicktags to semantically correctly markup phrasing content, that in offline world would require quotation marks.

[peterwilsoncc]

@mcnesium, welcome to trac!

We've decided to close this as wontfix for a number of reasons:

• xhtml is still widely used so html5 can't be assumed,
• despite the disconnect between the buttons, we feel strong and em are more semantically correct, and,
• as you identify, a similarity between word-processors and the WordPress editor is important.

Thanks.