<b>

The HTML <b> element represents a span of text stylistically different from normal text, without conveying any special importance or relevance, and that is typically rendered in boldface.

Content categories	Flow content, phrasing content, palpable content.
Permitted content	Phrasing content.
Tag omission	None, both the starting and ending tag are mandatory.
Permitted parents	Any element that accepts phrasing content.
Permitted ARIA roles	Any
DOM interface	HTMLElement Up to Gecko 1.9.2 (Firefox 4) inclusive, Firefox implements the HTMLSpanElement interface for this element.

Attributes

This element only includes the global attributes.

Usage notes

• Use the <b> for cases like keywords in a summary, product names in a review, or other spans of text whose typical presentation would be boldfaced.
• Do not confuse the <b> element with the <strong>, <em>, or <mark> elements. The <strong> element represents text of certain importance, <em> puts some emphasis on the text and the <mark> element represents text of certain relevance. The <b> element doesn't convey such special semantic information; use it only when no others fit.
• Similarly, do not mark titles and headings using the <b> element. For this purpose, use the <h1> to <h6> tags. Further, stylesheets can change the default style of these elements, with the result that they are not necessarily displayed in bold.
• It is a good practice to use the class attribute on the <b> in order to convey additional semantic information (for example <b class="lead"> for the first sentence in a paragraph). This eases the development of several stylings of a web document, without the need to change its HTML code.
• Historically, the <b> element was meant to make text boldface. Styling information has been deprecated since HTML4, so the meaning of the <b> element has been changed.
• If there is no semantic purpose on using the <b> element, using css property font-weight with bold value would be a better choice for making text bold.

Example

<p>
  This article describes several <b>text-level</b> elements.
  It explains their usage in an <b>HTML</b> document.   
</p>
Keywords are displayed with the default style of the <b>
element, likely in bold.

Result

This article describes several text-level elements. It explains their usage in an HTML document.

Keywords are displayed with the default style of the <b> element, likely in bold.

Specifications

Specification	Status	Comment
WHATWG HTML Living Standard The definition of '<b>' in that specification.	Living Standard
HTML5 The definition of '<b>' in that specification.	Recommendation
HTML 4.01 Specification The definition of '<b>' in that specification.	Recommendation

Browser compatibility

See also

• Others elements conveying text-level semantics: <a>, <em>, <strong>, <small>, <cite>, <q>, <dfn>, <abbr>, <time>, <code>, <var>, <samp>, <kbd>, <sub>, <sup>, <i>, <mark>, <ruby>, <rp>, <rt>, <bdo>, <span>, <br>, <wbr>.
• Using <b> and <i> elements (W3C)