246996016-HTML5-Step-by-Step

7 Formatting Text by
Using Style Sheets
In this chapter, you will learn how to
4 Specify a font family.
4 Specify a font size and color.
4 Apply bold and italics.
4 Apply strikethrough and underlining.
4 Create inline spans.
4 Adjust spacing between letters.
Learning how to create style rules opens up a whole new world in HTML formatting.
Virtually anything that you can do in a word-processing program, you can do in HTML
by using styles.
You might be wondering whether the simple text-formatting tags you learned about
in Part 1 of the book, such as the and tags, are still relevant. They are—to a
degree. The W3C is increasingly focused on applying text formatting by using styles,
which means you should try to use the style-based formatting that you’ll learn in this
chapter (and the next). However, those old tags still work perfectly well when you create
HTML5 documents, and Web browsers will continue to support tag-based formatting for
a long time. If you’ve already created an extensive Web site that uses formatting tags,
there’s no big rush to recreate the existing pages by using styles. For new pages, however,
it’s a good idea to do it “right” from the start by using styles for all your formatting.
In this chapter, you’ll learn about character-based formatting—that is, formatting that
makes individual characters look a certain way. You’ll learn how to specify fonts, sizes,
and colors; how to use styles to apply bold, italic, strikethrough, or underline styling to
your text; and how to add a background to text and adjust the spacing between letters.
In Chapter 8, “Formatting Paragraphs by Using Style Sheets,” you’ll learn about paragraph
formatting features such as line spacing, indentation, and alignment.
103