Currently, “bold” and “italic” markup doesn’t actually output bold and italic text (semantically); instead, it outputs strongly emphasized (<strong>) and emphasized (<em>) text. This is completely wrong and semantic markup abuse, since we can’t guarantee that bold text will only be used for strong importance or that italic text will only be used for emphasis. HTML output for this markup should be changed to general-purpose elements (i.e. *%text%* (_%text%_) should be <i>%text%</i>, not <em>%text%</em>, and **%text%** (__%text%__) should be <b>%text%</b>, not <strong>%text%</strong>).
No. They are tested standards, and were created based on extensive data and research.