Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Inline Styles

You can add style information to an individual element by using the style attribute within the HTML tag for that element. The value of the style attribute is one or more standard style declarations, as shown here:

    <h1style="color: red">This Heading will be Red</h1>

    <p style="font-size: 12px; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif">
    This is the content of the paragraph to be set with the
    described styles.</p>

Note that if the style attribute uses double quotation marks as shown, quoted values within the list (such as the font name “Trebuchet MS” in the example) must use single quotation marks. The reverse is also valid: if the document uses single quotes for attributes, then contained quoted values require double quotes.

Although a perfectly valid use of style information, inline styles are equivalent to the font extension to HTML in that they pollute the document with presentation information. With inline styles, presentation information is still tied to individual content elements, so any changes must be made in each individual tag in every file. Inline styles are best used only occasionally to override higher-level rules. In fact, the style attribute has been deprecated in XHTML 1.1 and does not appear in other XML languages.