HTML and XHTML Step by Step

Creating Inline Spans

Part of the problem with replacing the old style tags like <b>, <i>, and <ins> with styles for individual items is that the style= argument must be placed within an existing tag. For example, in the following sentence, how would you avoid using <b> to make only one word bold?

<p>I had a <b>great</b> time.</p>

The word great does not have any container tags that surround it alone, so there’s no place to put a style= argument. The solution is to use an inline span. A span is simply a shell into which you can place any arguments you need. For example, the preceding example could be written as follows to use a style:

<p>I had a <span style="text-weight: bold">great</span> time.</p>

That’s an awful lot of typing, but there’s a good ...