- Adding a Paragraph
- Specifying Fine Print
- Marking Important and Emphasized Text
- Creating a Figure
- Indicating a Citation or Reference
- Quoting Text
- Specifying Time
- Explaining Abbreviations
- Defining a Term
- Creating Superscripts and Subscripts
- Adding Author Contact Information
- Noting Edits and Inaccurate Text
- Marking Up Code
- Using Preformatted Text
- Highlighting Text
- 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
The small element represents side comments such as fine print, which, according to the HTML5 spec, “typically features disclaimers, caveats, legal restrictions, or copyrights. Small print is also sometimes used for attribution or for satisfying licensing requirements.”
The small element 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.
)
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’s appropriate for 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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The small element 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.