# Weak vs Strong Emphasis

**URL:** <https://talk.commonmark.org/t/weak-vs-strong-emphasis/1943>\
**Category:** Spec\
**Created:** [December 23, 2015, 7:57am UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/weak-vs-strong-emphasis/1943 "2015-12-23T07:57:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![chrisalley](https://cdn.commonmark.org/user_avatar/talk.commonmark.org/chrisalley/32/906_2.png) [@chrisalley](https://talk.commonmark.org/u/chrisalley)\
**Post date:** [December 23, 2015, 11:05pm UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/weak-vs-strong-emphasis/1943/2 "2015-12-23T23:05:39Z")

</div>

I’m favour of using the terminology “stress emphasis” and “strong importance”; maintaining consistency with HTML5 makes sense since that is the primary output format.

Definitions from the HTML5 spec:

[http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/text-level-semantics.html#the-em-element](http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/text-level-semantics.html#the-em-element)  
[http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/text-level-semantics.html#the-strong-element](http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/text-level-semantics.html#the-strong-element)

---

_[View the full topic](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/weak-vs-strong-emphasis/1943)._