I'll cut right to the chase, here's my proposal:

The <big> element can be used to represent the “big idea” of a document or section, ie. text that should still be read when skimming through a document

Rationale

Why do we make text big?

Well, to answer that, it helps to look at when we make text big.

The vast majority of the time, big text is used as part of a header.

Why do we have headers? well, several reasons, but a big part of it is skimming: looking through a document without reading it fully. Headers allow you to skim through a document until you find the relevant section.

So, the purpose of font size within prose seems clear: it makes text harder to ignore. this can also be seen within news articles, where important quotes are often shown as much larger than the surrounding text.

This is similar, yet distinct, from <strong> and <em>, which usually convey emphasis within a sentence or paragraph, but which will not do much to grab the attention of someone skimming over an entire document or page.

Parity with <small>

Unlike <big>, <small> was never deprecated. This seems to be because W3C was able to come up with a semantic meaning for it.

Well, here's a semantic meaning for <big>. Do with it what you will.

#html #web

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