Any ideas why <strong> tag doesn't work but CSS does?

Question

<span class="bold">Some Title</span>

.bold
{
    font-weight:bold;
}

This renders boldly, however this:

<strong>Some Title</strong>

Does not. It just renders as regular text. I'm using the HTML5 doctype and the Google font:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Sans&v2' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Anyone experienced this as well?

Edit: BoltClock suggested it might be CSS reset, here's the chunk for <strong>

/** CSS Reset **/
html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td,
article, aside, canvas, details, embed, 
figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup, 
menu, nav, output, ruby, section, summary,
time, mark, audio, video {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    border: 0;
    font-size: 100%;
    font: inherit;
    vertical-align: baseline;
}

Annulment

Do you happen to have a CSS reset that forgot to "reset" styles for strong? – Lookthrough

If you are trying this in jsfiddle uncheck Normalized CSS – Vickery

@Bolt yes I am! But I'm not sure how this would interfere? – Annulment

I posted an answer to explain. – Lookthrough

Answer 1

If there is nothing else for strong, then there's your problem (or rather, the CSS reset's problem).

The font: inherit style, together with all those selectors, is asking everything to inherit every font style from its parent. The default weight is, obviously, normal, so strong text is no longer bold until you redeclare it:

strong { font-weight: bold; }

(Some other obvious elements to reset styles for are b, em, i, code elements, quote elements, tables, headings, lists, etc.)

Lookthrough

tl;dr inherit means inherit from parent element, not inherit browser defaults – Lookthrough

Answer 2

add:

strong{
 font-weight:bold;
}

to your CSS. Maybe somewhere you reset this tag.

Outwit

Answer 3

Those resets are reseting not just padding and margins, as BoltClock explained, font:inherit can break your browsers deafault behaviour with displaying proper fonts style.

Stellate

Answer 4

In addition to BoltClock's answer, I also found out that we must use the complete tag names for closing the tags, otherwise the STRONG tag used afterwards doesn't work. For example,

<H1> heading </H1>

instead of,

<H1> heading </>

Oleomargarine

Is the situation where </> is actually valid? Genuinely curious – Trueman

looks like they are not valid. #3558619 – Oleomargarine

I think that question is discussing self closing such as <img /> - I was curious about the use of </> – Trueman

</> or <img/> is not valid, according to the specs, but the browser still renders it. it should be like this: <img> </img>. it is under the section "end tags" have a look: w3.org/TR/html5/syntax.html#void-elements – Oleomargarine

Answer 5

For me the issue was Angular Material .mat-option class, for some reason using <b> or <strong> didn't work with their font. Changing their font to another one solved the issue for me.

Galluses

Answer 6

You can see the strong tag is strikethrough (invalid) in elements tab by em or s or any tag when checked CSS.

You should add the code below in main.css:

b,
strong * {
  font-weight: bold !important;
}

Thais

Really shouldn't be using !important unless you have no other option to take precedence (ie: if you don't have access to the HTML and someone has inline style attributes). – Euphemia