Character Emphasis Modes

HTML allows you to specify special character highlighting or emphasis (eg boldface, italics, etc). These elements do NOT cause page breaks. They simply change the rendering of the characters enclosed inside the tags.

HTML allows you to specify these modes in two ways:

• Logically (by the logical meaning of the special text you wish to mark)
• physically (by explicitly specifying the style you want, such as italics, boldfaced, underline, etc.).

Note that the logical styles may not be distinct (i.e. different logical styles may be rendered in the same way). Also, some browsers do not support all physical styles. For example, Mosaic does NOT support underlined text.

HTML 3 proposed several new text emphasis elements, such as BIG and SMALL for bigger and smaller text, and SUP and SUB for superscripts and subscripts. These are integrated into HTML 3.2, and are implemented on most browsers.