Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

Summary

Even without trying to alter the font in use, there are many ways to change the appearance of text. There are classic effects such as underlining, of course, but CSS also gives us the ability to draw lines over text or through it, change the amount of space between words and letters, indent the first line of a paragraph (or other block-level element), align text to the left or right, and much more. You can even alter the amount of space between lines of text, although this operation is unexpectedly complicated and covered in detail in Chapter 8.

These behaviors are all relatively well supported, or else not supported at all. Full justification of text is one of the big ones that is not well supported, and most user agents released during the twentieth century exhibited bugs in the text decoration and vertical alignment, as well as line height calculations. On the other hand, word and letterspacing almost always work correctly when they’re supported, and text indentation has experienced only a few very small bugs. The same is true of the ability to alter capitalization, which is usually supported correctly.

Of course, the other thing authors generally want to do with text is change which font is being used, as well as change its size, weight, and other aspects of the font. We’ll see how this happens in the next chapter.