[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 56400] New: strong and b should be font-weight: bold, not bolder

Tue Mar 15 12:07:44 PDT 2011

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56400

           Summary: strong and b should be font-weight: bold, not bolder
           Product: WebKit
           Version: 528+ (Nightly build)
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: Minor
          Priority: P2
         Component: CSS
        AssignedTo: webkit-unassigned at lists.webkit.org
        ReportedBy: Simetrical+webkit at gmail.com

HTML5 says b and strong have font-weight: bold instead of bolder:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/rendering.html#fonts-and-colors

Some discussion about this can be found at the following HTML5 and Mozilla bugs:

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12154
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=589124

Mozilla received reports that some sites displayed incorrectly when Firefox 4 (with DirectWrite enabled on Windows) started actually respecting font-weights higher than 700, because they accidentally nested <b> tags and the text inadvertently became too bold.  font-weight: bolder is inherently inconsistent across browsers and so shouldn't be the default style, IMO.

Currently all browsers but Opera make b and strong font-weight: bolder, but in practice this is usually not observable because font-weights of 700, 800, and 900 generally get the same fonts assigned to them anyway.  So changing to font-weight: bold is likely to increase compatibility, not decrease it.

Test-case to demonstrate that the default is font-weight: bolder:

data:text/html,<!doctype html>
<p style=font-weight:100>
<b>Should be bold per HTML5</b>

Chrome 11 dev does not display the text bold.

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