(This is more of a curiousity question than any pending disaster :D )

So the <b> and <i> tags have been around since near the beginning of the web (I assume). But now we have CSS and many people apposing "stylistic html tags." They are stylistic tags, but they're really not so bad, as they save us from having to make a <span class="bold"> a whole bunch of times, reducing download times. Seeing as they don't take up much space, are easy to use, can possibly be useful to screen-readers, search engines, and other applications that don't care much about how a document looks, and removing them would break TONS of html code, I'm guessing probably not, but I still wanted to bring up the topic. :)