Just to play devil’s advocate here, Dave’s argument could be reversed. What if you only wanted to link one work inside a phrase that had a [strong] tag around it, etc?

Right, I think in this case, the link definitely comes inside the <strong> tag. It’s pretty easy when part of a link needs emphasis or part of the emphasized phrase needs a link. It’s when they’re both the same that it… really could go either way, I suppose.

@Joe:

Visually emphasizing parts of a link description looks pretty 1997 to me.

I’m not worried about this. If something inside a link deserves emphasis, that’s the way you semantically mark it up. Can’t really be worried about the cosmetics of it.

To add emphasis, there has to be non-emphasized content. Not technically. You could put your entire page in a strong tag, but logically, you are emphasizing some content over other content.

Also, when using strong tags you are emphasizing content, not structure… words, not their behavior or appearance.

So for me, I would put the strong tag first as you are emphasizing text in the larger context (paragraph, list item, etc) and not emphasizing all text in a link (which has non non-emphasized text).

Just the way my brain works.

Visually emphasizing parts of a link description looks pretty 1997 to me. But if you are adding semantic value to parts of a link description (microformats), the added tags in the description don’t really bug me.

[strong]Visit our [a]support site[/a][/strong]

So, I think the question here can only apply when the there is only one word in question, or when the entire phrase in question would be surrounded by both tags.

However, having said that, I’d probably put the [a] tag on the outside as well.

[a]Visit our [strong]Support Site[/strong][/a]
[a]Download via [acronym title=""]FTP[/acronym][/a]
[a]Foo [em]&[/em] Bar[/a]

strong, em, span, acronym – are rarely applied to the entire link. In cases where they’re not, they HAVE to be the inner element. Therefore — to avoid thinking too much — they should ALWAYS be the inner element.


Visit our Support Site
Download via FTP
Foo & Bar


It wouldn’t feel right in the first example, if I decided the entire link should be bold, that I’d have to change the order to [strong][a]Visit our Support Site[/a][/strong]

1. The <a> should capture emphais
2. The <a> should only link the raw phrase

I gotta admit, not sure which side I stand on yet. The emphasis isn’t necessarily what’s being linked (though in Hilary’s case, the <strong> does need to be inside inside the link).

* His first was that I’m linking the phrase, not the emphasis.

I disagree. Remember that <strong> is a *semantic* tag. If you were just linking the phrase and wanted it to appear bold, you’d style the link to achieve this. But by adding <strong>, you’re not just making it bold, you’re emphasizing it in a semantic sense. I believe the hyperlink should respect the semantic emphasis and thus include it within.

* Also, he brought up the point that putting the <strong> outside is cleaner for semantic web scraping stuff.

True, but you could have any number of tags within a hyperlink, e.g. <a href="boston"><span class="locality">Boston</span></a> . To be robust, a scraper has to deal with tags in hyperlinks anyway.

I reserve the right to be entirely wrong about all of this.

I tend to put the <strong> tags inside the <a> tags because there are some occasions when I want only a single word in a link to be bold, and I like to maintain consistency.

For example: <a href=”http://www.darowski.com”>Adam’s <strong>excellent</strong> blog</a>.

I think both are correct, but it’s interesting what leads someone to make one choice over the other.