Text Level

Block level elements define logical sections of documents. This page covers text level elements, which affect text inside of block level elements. Some define logical roles of pieces of text; others define how text should be rendered. We call the two kinds Logical Text Elements and Physical Text Elements.

Logical Text Elements

Sometimes text needs to convey more meaning than just the words themselves. An example of this is emphasized text. There is a difference (albeit slight) between "Put it on the blue table" and "Put it on the blue table." In the second case, the word "blue" contains more information than just the color of the table. It also implies (in one context) "no, that's wrong; I said the blue table." So the word "blue" is more than just ordinary, everyday text -- it's emphasized text. How a browser treats emphasized text is up to the browser (and sometimes the reader), but any browser will always denote emphasized text as different from regular text, because they are two different things.

Here is a list of Logical Text Elements:

• EM - Emphasized text
• STRONG - Strongly emphasized
• DFN - Definition of a term
• CODE - Code (program language, HTML, etc.) fragment
• SAMP - Sample text
• KBD - Keyboard input
• VAR - Variable
• CITE - Short citation, e.g. a book title

Physical Text Elements

Physical Elements merely changes the appearance of text. As we saw above, emphasized text is often rendered as italic, but it also denotes the text as something special. However, if you just need text to be italicized, but not emphasized, such as a phrase in a different language, you would use Physical Elements. In this case, it would be I - as in <I>caveat emptor</I>, which is rendered as caveat emptor.

Physically marked up text may not always be treated differently from normal text. This is especially true for speaking browsers, which may use different voices for logically marked text but not for physically marked text. For example, you can probably imagine what strongly emphasized text sounds like, but can you imagine what underlined text sounds like?

Basically, if you want text to appear differently than normal text, you have to ask, "Why do I want that?" If you want it to look different because it is a section heading, you use a Heading. If it's because you want the text to carry extra information, you use Logical Elements. If you just want it to look a certain way because of convention, but the appearance is not changing the meaning or context of the text, use Physical Elements.

Here is a list of Physical Elements:

• I - Italics
• B - Bold
• U - Underline
• STRIKE - Strikeout
• BIG - Larger text
• SMALL - Smaller text
• SUB - _Subscript
• SUP - ^Superscript
• TT - Teletype

For a complete list of Text Level elements, check out the Web Design Group's grouped overview of all HTML 3.2 elements.

Previous: Block Level
Next: Links