HTML 5 Killed the “big” Tag (2011)

Ah, the evolution of technology, where, things gets better and better.

HTML 5 chopped off the big tag, yet it retained the small tag. How consistent.

Instead of big, you are supposed to use em or strong or b? But big carries a sematic that's not one of emphasis, strong, warning, bold. If you are going to argue that HTML should be used for semantic markup, then please chop off {b, i, u} off the earth.

When would big be meaningful? For example, you want to show Chinese characters big, so user can see the detail.

Another reason is that sometimes i want to make a title larger, but semantically i don't want it to be a header such as {h1, h2, h3}. For example, a Tag Cloud, fashionable around 2007.

Sure one can resort to CSS, for example:

<span style="font-size:4em">💀</span>

, but “big” would carry with it a precise and semantic info. After all, “small” and “b” are there too.

When you get deep into a technology, often you find many oddities, whose reasoning are buried in obscurity, or simply idiotic.