<b> to help with terminology-heavy contentContent creators in the tech world are constantly challenged by all the terminology involved when creating and documenting domain-specific languages, specifications, and such. The result is that there is actually very little good content that associates terms according to any kind of best practice, even though there are already well-established best practices for this sort of thing. Any good tech book will follow the convention of stylistically identifying a new term the first time that it is used within a given scope. After that, no stylistic distractions are made. This is the very reason that the HTML <b> element was restored in HTML5, to represent such terminology that might be tied to some sort of link.
The b element represents a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian purposes, without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of an alternate voice or mood, such as key words in a document abstract, product names in a review, actionable words in interactive text-driven software, or an article lede.1
The HTML5 specification explains that the b element has nothing to do “boldness” or “strong emphasis.” In fact, “b” is kept because of its historical usage for exactly those reasons. KEGML uses the name beacon instead, which is “an intentionally conspicuous device designed to attract attention to a specific location”2