Emphasis, comments, and special characters

Meaningful emphasis

Real content needs emphasis, and HTML gives it meaning, not just a look. That matters for the same reason headings did in lesson 2-2: screen readers change their voice for emphasized text and search engines weigh it, but only when you use the elements that carry meaning.

<p>Submissions close <strong>Friday at noon</strong>.
You <em>must</em> include your email.</p>

• strong marks importance (deadlines, warnings). Browsers render it bold.
• em marks stress emphasis, the word you would lean on when speaking. Browsers render it italic.

There are also b and i, which bold and italicize with no meaning attached. Prefer strong and em: same pixels, more information. If you only want the look with no emphasis intended, that is a CSS job (unit 4).

Comments and reserved characters

Two practical tools you will use in every real file.

Comments are notes for humans that the browser ignores. Teams use them to label regions and to temporarily disable markup while debugging:

<!-- TODO: swap placeholder logo before launch -->

Character entities solve a real conflict: < and & are reserved — the browser reads < as the start of a tag. To display those characters as content, you write an entity, &name;:

So a page that displays the code <p> must be written as <p>, or the browser will try to interpret it as a real paragraph tag instead of showing it. Documentation sites do this constantly — this course's own code snippets rely on it.