- 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
Marking Important and Emphasized Text
The strong element denotes important text, while em conveys emphasis. You can use them individually or together as your content requires (
and 
).
The first sentence has both strong and em, while the second has em only. If <em>under any circumstances</em> were marked up instead as <strong>under any circumstances</strong>, it would have greater importance than the text contained in the surrounding strong.
... <body> <p><strong>Warning: Do not approach the zombies<em>under any circumstances</em>.</strong>They may<em>look</em>friendly, but that's just because they want to eat your arm.</p> </body> </html>
Browsers typically display strong text in boldface and em text in italics. If em is a child of a strong element (see the first sentence in 
), its text will be both italicized and bold.
To mark important text
- Type <strong>.
- Type the text that you want to mark as important.
- Type </strong>.
To emphasize text
- Type <em>.
- Type the text that you want to emphasize.
- Type </em>.
TIP
You can style any text as bold or italic with CSS, as well as override the browser’s default styling of elements like strong and em 
. For details, consult “Creating Italics” and “Applying Bold Formatting” in Chapter 10.