Warning: Rant. I was posting on a phpBB site and was using some basic formatting code to emphasize certain words. I, being the 1337 haxX0r that I am, knew that encasing those words in [b] or [i] in that environ would convert it to or in HTML. Here's where the title comes in: NOPE! It freaking creates spans with a CSS style statement for the appropriate style... instead of using 7 fucking characters (opening and closing tags) to do the exact same thing. 39 chars 7 chars 40 chars 7 chars And if you use bold + italic, it's a whopping 79 characters compared to 14. phpBB isn't smart enough to combine the styles in a single span tag. So my discovery of this was precipitated by not seeing the text displayed as it should be by Lynx. Obviously bold is less common for TTY screens and I've never seen italic on console, so Lynx allows you to recolor different types of styles. It works great, except that, for good reason, Lynx doesn't parse through CSS. It's pointless for Lynx to try to render CSS. So none of the styling is pushed through. It's not a huge deal, but it's kind of annoying. Now I know that many people don't use text browsers nowadays... or browsers that don't support CSS. I get it. I do. But why, for the love of God, would you CHANGE what has been working for years and years for something less efficient and bulkier? I wouldn't have even been mad if they had used or , but a 39-char span? What fucking browser doesn't understand ? Why would you change that? "Yeah, I was just going to drive a normal sedan like a Corolla to work, but honestly I'd prefer to drive myself in a school bus. What do you mean 'that makes no sense'?" You'd think people working with a language as established as PHP wouldn't shun efficient, sensible code. But they did. PHP puts enough strain on a server as is, and now you're just making markup take up 5-10x the bytes it needs to? What were they thinking?!