- Starting a New Paragraph
- Adding Author Contact Information
- Creating a Figure
- Specifying Time
- Marking Important and Emphasized Text
- Indicating a Citation or Reference
- Quoting Text
- Highlighting Text
- Explaining Abbreviations
- Defining a Term
- Creating Superscripts and Subscripts
- Noting Edits and Inaccurate Text
- Marking Up Code
- Using Preformatted Text
- Specifying Fine Print
- Creating a Line Break
- Creating Spans
- Other Elements
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Specifying Fine Print
According to HTML5, small represents side comments such as fine print, which “typically features disclaimers, caveats, legal restrictions, or copyrights. Small print is also sometimes used for attribution or for satisfying licensing requirements.” small is intended for brief portions of inline text, not for text spanning multiple paragraphs or other elements (
and 
).
The small element denotes brief legal notices in both instances shown. The second one is a copyright notice contained in a page-level footer, a common convention.
... <body> <p>Order now to receive free shipping.<small>(Some restrictions may apply.) </small></p> ... <footer> <p><small>© 2011 The Super Store. All Rights Reserved. </small></p> </footer> </body> </html>
The small element may render smaller than normal text in some browsers, but the visual size is immaterial to whether you should mark up your content with it.
To specify fine print
- Type <small>.
- Type the text that represents a legal disclaimer, note, attribution, and so on.
- Type </small>.
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Be sure to use small only because it fits your content, not because you want to reduce the text size, as happens in some browsers
. You can always adjust the size with CSS (even making it larger if you’d like). See “Setting the Font Size” in Chapter 10 for more information.
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small is a common choice for marking up your page’s copyright notice (
and ). It’s meant for short phrases like that, so don’t wrap it around long legal notices, such as your Terms of Use or Privacy Policy pages. Those should be marked up with paragraphs and other semantics, as necessary.