EM and STRONG were great ideas that never took off -- Ekk & I think they may have originated as IE-only tags. I and B really are more efficient (less page weight), and now that the browser field has been pretty much narrowed to IE, NS, and Opera, eh no worries. The U tag, btw, is a bad idea; people get confused and think that the underlined text is a link. And, no joke, I have seen people compulsively clicking on underlined text, because they're sure they must be missing the link. I don't think I, B, or U were ever deprecated; there may've been a suggestion of it, but it never made it into a final spec.
*shudders and twitches at memories of village idiots*
Re: Rar. :)
*shudders and twitches at memories of village idiots*