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It's possible to add some excitement to your text by using the <b> and <i> tags to make your text bold and italic:

This is <b>new</b> and
<i>improved</i>!

In this tutorial, we'll examine a way to add even more visual effects to text. In older versions of HTML, this was done with the <font> tag. However, HTML is evolving and improving, and the World Wide Web Consortium has come up with something much better and more powerful than that tag: styles. The styles we're going to show you work only with newer browsers like Netscape Navigator version 4.0 and above, or Internet Explorer version 4.0 and above.

What's a style? In simple terms, it's anything that lets you distinguish one bit of text from another. A word's color is part of its style; red text is easily distinguished from green text. Typeface is another part of style; Helvetica looks very different from Times New Roman. The text size and background color are two other aspects of style. There are lots of other aspects of text style, but let's not go overboard!

We'll start by finding out how to specify the color aspect of a style.

Specifying Color

Other on-line tutorials on this website:

• Effective use of links
• Introduction to forms
• Effective use of images