About Character Formatting in HTML.
= Index DOT Html by Brian Wilson =
The main intent of SGML (and the derivative HTML language) is to be a device independent language for describing the content of documents. To accomplish this, it tries to divorce presentation rules from textual content. Most HTML elements are not intended to give direct control to the author over how the final layout will look, but many Character Formatting elements (especially many of the newer ones) now give an author this control. Physical Vs. Virtual Character Formatting Elements There are two classes of character formatting styles — Physical styles (referred to currently as «inline presentational elements» in the XHTML specs and in the past as «typographical elements») and Virtual styles (referred to currently as «inline phrasal elements» in the XHTML specs and in the past as «logical» or «idiomatic» elements.) Each Physical style should be rendered distinctly from other Physical styles, while each Virtual style should be rendered distinctly from other Virtual styles. Many of the Physical styles are the common visual rendering analog for Virtual styles (i.e.: strong emphasis strong> is usually rendered as boldface: b>)
Physical Styles [, , , , , , , , , , ] Physical styles explicitly describe what the final appearance of the contained text should look like. If the rendering device does not have the capability to produce the indicated Physical style (such as a browser for the visually impaired), this formatting may be lost.
Virtual Styles [, , , , , , , , , , ] Virtual styles purposefully do not include any final rendering hints in their definitions. These styles describe instead how the contained text is used in the context of the document. The main benefit of such elements is when a document is experienced using a method OTHER than a standard screen-based visual environment; the INTENT of the content can be preserved.
Which Styles to Use? The original HTML 2.0 specification contained all the Virtual styles listed above, while including only a few of the listed Physical styles. The many Physical styles now available are more recent and reflect a demand from authors for more explicit rendering control. To improve portability though, it is usually recommended to use Virtual styles rather than Physical in your documents.
Example: Use of the i> element to render text in italics will only be effective on those browsers which are capable of displaying italics. Not all browsers are guaranteed to have this ability. It is often better to use logical styles such as em> which specify that the contents need emphasis of SOME sort, regardless of the presentation mode.
Fundamental text and font styling
In this article we’ll start you on your journey towards mastering text styling with CSS. Here we’ll go through all the basic fundamentals of text/font styling in detail, including setting font weight, family and style, font shorthand, text alignment and other effects, and line and letter spacing.
| Prerequisites: | Basic computer literacy, HTML basics (study Introduction to HTML), CSS basics (study Introduction to CSS). |
|---|---|
| Objective: | To learn the fundamental properties and techniques needed to style text on web pages. |
What is involved in styling text in CSS?
If you have worked with HTML or CSS already, e.g., by working through these tutorials in order, then you know that text inside an element is laid out inside the element’s content box. It starts at the top left of the content area (or the top right, in the case of RTL language content), and flows towards the end of the line. Once it reaches the end, it goes down to the next line and flows to the end again. This pattern repeats until all the content has been placed in the box. Text content effectively behaves like a series of inline elements, being laid out on lines adjacent to one another, and not creating line breaks until the end of the line is reached, or unless you force a line break manually using the element.
Note: If the above paragraph leaves you feeling confused, then no matter — go back and review our Box model article to brush up on the box model theory before carrying on.
The CSS properties used to style text generally fall into two categories, which we’ll look at separately in this article:
- Font styles: Properties that affect a text’s font, e.g., which font gets applied, its size, and whether it’s bold, italic, etc.
- Text layout styles: Properties that affect the spacing and other layout features of the text, allowing manipulation of, for example, the space between lines and letters, and how the text is aligned within the content box.
Note: Bear in mind that the text inside an element is all affected as one single entity. You can’t select and style subsections of text unless you wrap them in an appropriate element (such as a or ), or use a text-specific pseudo-element like ::first-letter (selects the first letter of an element’s text), ::first-line (selects the first line of an element’s text), or ::selection (selects the text currently highlighted by the cursor).
Fonts
Let’s move straight on to look at properties for styling fonts. In this example, we’ll apply some CSS properties to the following HTML sample:
h1>Tommy the cath1> p>Well I remember it as though it were a meal ago…p> p> Said Tommy the Cat as he reeled back to clear whatever foreign matter may have nestled its way into his mighty throat. Many a fat alley rat had met its demise while staring point blank down the cavernous barrel of this awesome prowling machine. Truly a wonder of nature this urban predator — Tommy the cat had many a story to tell. But it was a rare occasion such as this that he did. p>
Color
The color property sets the color of the foreground content of the selected elements, which is usually the text, but can also include a couple of other things, such as an underline or overline placed on text using the text-decoration property.
color can accept any CSS color unit, for example:
This will cause the paragraphs to become red, rather than the standard browser default of black, like so:
h1>Tommy the cath1> p>Well I remember it as though it were a meal ago…p> p> Said Tommy the Cat as he reeled back to clear whatever foreign matter may have nestled its way into his mighty throat. Many a fat alley rat had met its demise while staring point blank down the cavernous barrel of this awesome prowling machine. Truly a wonder of nature this urban predator — Tommy the cat had many a story to tell. But it was a rare occasion such as this that he did. p>
Font families
To set a different font for your text, you use the font-family property — this allows you to specify a font (or list of fonts) for the browser to apply to the selected elements. The browser will only apply a font if it is available on the machine the website is being accessed on; if not, it will just use a browser default font. A simple example looks like so:
This would make all paragraphs on a page adopt the arial font, which is found on any computer.
Web safe fonts
Speaking of font availability, there are only a certain number of fonts that are generally available across all systems and can therefore be used without much worry. These are the so-called web safe fonts.
Most of the time, as web developers we want to have more specific control over the fonts used to display our text content. The problem is to find a way to know which font is available on the computer used to see our web pages. There is no way to know this in every case, but the web safe fonts are known to be available on nearly all instances of the most used operating systems (Windows, macOS, the most common Linux distributions, Android, and iOS).
The list of actual web safe fonts will change as operating systems evolve, but it’s reasonable to consider the following fonts web safe, at least for now (many of them have been popularized thanks to the Microsoft Core fonts for the Web initiative in the late 90s and early 2000s):
| Name | Generic type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Arial | sans-serif | It’s often considered best practice to also add Helvetica as a preferred alternative to Arial as, although their font faces are almost identical, Helvetica is considered to have a nicer shape, even if Arial is more broadly available. |
| Courier New | monospace | Some OSes have an alternative (possibly older) version of the Courier New font called Courier. It’s considered best practice to use both with Courier New as the preferred alternative. |
| Georgia | serif | |
| Times New Roman | serif | Some OSes have an alternative (possibly older) version of the Times New Roman font called Times. It’s considered best practice to use both with Times New Roman as the preferred alternative. |
| Trebuchet MS | sans-serif | You should be careful with using this font — it isn’t widely available on mobile OSes. |
| Verdana | sans-serif |
Note: Among various resources, the cssfontstack.com website maintains a list of web safe fonts available on Windows and macOS operating systems, which can help you make your decision about what you consider safe for your usage.
Note: There is a way to download a custom font along with a webpage, to allow you to customize your font usage in any way you want: web fonts. This is a little bit more complex, and we will discuss it in a separate article later on in the module.
Default fonts
CSS defines five generic names for fonts: serif , sans-serif , monospace , cursive , and fantasy . These are very generic and the exact font face used from these generic names can vary between each browser and each operating system that they are displayed on. It represents a worst case scenario where the browser will try its best to provide a font that looks appropriate. serif , sans-serif , and monospace are quite predictable and should provide something reasonable. On the other hand, cursive and fantasy are less predictable and we recommend using them very carefully, testing as you go.
The five names are defined as follows:
body font-family: sans-serif; >Character style in html
Character style elements in HTML
What NOT to do and how it should be done.
HTML 4.0 (Strict) includes some elements which provide character styles. These elements should be replaced by the use of structural elements or style sheets wherever possible.
All the elements in question except PRE are found in the Character Element submenu of the XHTML menu:
b and i These should be replaced by use of the strong and em elements where they are used to provide emphasis for a word or phrase. There are special elements to denote headings, terms that are being defined, and certain special uses, such as a quotation, piece of computer code, etc. If the elements are simply being used to provide heavier font style sheets should be used instead big and small In general these effects should be achieved with style sheets. Where they are used to denote specific types of information such as the source of a quotation, sample computer input or output, etc, there are appropriate HTML elements that should be used. sub and sup Style sheets should be used to achieve the presentation effects of these elements. In cases such as mathematical expressions, an appropriate markup language such as MathML should be used where possible. tt and pre Authors should use style sheets to achieve these effects.
