Lesson 8 : HTML Text Formatting

This text is bold

This text is big

This text is italic

This is computer output

This is _subscript and ^superscript

HTML Formatting Tags

HTML uses tags like <b> and <i> for formatting output, like bold or italic text.

These HTML tags are called formatting tags (look at the bottom of this page for a complete reference).

Often <strong> renders as <b>, and <em> renders as <i>.

However, there is a difference in the meaning of these tags:

<b> or <i> defines bold or italic text only.

<strong> or <em> means that you want the text to be rendered in a way that the user understands as "important". Today, all major browsers render strong as bold and em as italics. However, if a browser one day wants to make a text highlighted with the strong feature, it might be cursive for example and not bold!