Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 4. Text Properties

While your web design efforts may be largely focused on picking the right colors and getting the coolest look for your pages, when it comes right down to it, you’ll probably spend most of your time worrying about where text will go and how it will look. This concern gave rise to HTML tags such as <FONT> and <CENTER>, which give you some measure of control over the appearance and placement of text.

Because of this fact, much of CSS is concerned with properties that affect text in one way or another. In CSS1, the properties are split up into two sections: “Text Properties” and “Font Properties.” This chapter is devoted to explaining the former. We’ll tackle fonts in Chapter 5—they’re quite complicated in their own way and so deserve a chapter all their own.

Manipulating Text

You may well wonder what the difference is between text and fonts. Simply put, text is the content. The font used to display it is just one more way of altering the appearance of the text. Before we get into fonts, though, there are some simpler ways to affect the appearance of your text. Besides, some of the things we discuss here will be important when we discuss the font properties, so it makes more sense to discuss the text properties first.

With the text properties, you can affect the position of text in relation to the rest of the line, and do things like superscripting, underlining, and changing the capitalization. You can even simulate, to a limited degree, the use of the Tab key ...