HTML Formatting

Formatting live HTML text can be done in many different ways. The simplest, which is also the most widely compatible, is to use a basic FONT tag and fill it with your preferred parameters. This will work with the ‘version 3’ Web browsers as well as the newer ones, ensuring compatibility with just about any browser capable of formatting text at all. The problem with this is that the FONT tag, while useful, doesn’t really go far enough. This is one of the main reasons behind the development of Cascading Style Sheets, also known as CSS. CSS allows a great many useful text formatting tricks to be employed, bringing Web page design and layout closer to desktop publishing levels.

The problem with CSS formatting isn’t really the level of control it allows, although there are real limits to what can be done. It is more to do with the fundamental nature of the CSS coding structure. FONT tags are very straightforward to use, but because CSS formatting is much more flexible, the structure is less friendly and memorable. Those used to juggling CSS style coding will undoubtedly feel fairly at home with it all, but it is far less easy for someone to get into from scratch.

Fortunately the key Web design applications - Dreamweaver, Freeway and GoLive - don’t demand that users write the code themselves. In particular, Freeway users work with DTP-style stylesheets and generate high-level CSS data without a hint of manual code-level intervention. However it is still worth understanding what goes on under the hood, as the insight should help give a broader understanding of what formatting code actually does.

One key point to remember is the way different type size formatting instructions work. The first size controls were all relative, scaling text up or down in relation to a notional ‘standard’ size. Eventually point sizes were introduced, which outraged the portions of the Internet community which felt the user should be in absolute control. Despite them, this general approach has become a very popular method, but there is one unpleasant drawback. Because Windows has standardised on a 96 pixels per inch measurement standard for dealing with text on screen while the Mac uses 72 points per inch, body text defined in certain ways looks fine on a Mac but looks too large on PCs. If it is changed to look right on PCs it can become illegible on Macs. The way around this annoying problem is to define all CSS sizes as pixel measurements rather than points. Thus text defined as 16 pixels on a Mac will look exactly the same on a PC. The best part about this is that as the Mac’s 72 pixels per inch standard corresponds with the typographic standard of 72 points per inch (particularly in rounded DTP terms), we can use the terms interchangeably - as long as the final code our tools generate uses ‘px’ instead of ‘pt’.

Basic FONT tag formatting is simple to produce, being no more than the crudest formatting instructions wrapped around the text in question.

CSS formatting information is stored at the head of a file (or externally), and is referenced by stylename tags placed around the text. It is much more flexible than the cruder FONT formatting method.