A better way to do this might be to use wikitext in the message, so you don't have to pass HTML as the var.  So: `'''Published by:''' $1`. Then you can get rid of the extra class (.reg-text) that overrides the bold styles below. Then when you print out the message use `->parse()`  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Messages_API#Output_modes_and_escaping