Ever want to spice up your text and break away from the default, 12-point Times Roman font that litters the Internet? Then it's time you learned about format tags. We're going to cover two types of text formatting, text-level and context-level.

     Text-level formatting changes the way text is rendered in the browser such as making text bold, italic, underlined, strike-through, etc. Below is a list of text-level format tags in alphabetic order.

<b> </b>
Description:	Renders the text it contains in boldface.
Attributes:	none
Syntax:	<b> text here </b>
Example:	This is bold
<basefont>
Description:	This sets the default font that is used in the web page.
Attributes:	face - font family (arial, tahoma) size - font size (1-7) color - font color
Syntax:	<basefont face="font_face" size="font_size" color="font_color">
Example:	<basefont face="tahoma" size="2" color="#ffffff">
<big> </big>
Description:	Renders text one size bigger than the default size.
Attributes:	none
Syntax:	<big> text here </big>
Example:	This is big
<font> </font>
Description:	Specifies a certain way to render a section of text.
Attributes:	face - font family (tahoma, arial) size - font size(1-7) color - font color
Syntax:	<font face="a_face" color="a_color" size="a_size"> text here </font>
Example:	This is red arial size 3
<i> </i>
Description:	Renders the text it contains in italics.
Attributes:	none
Syntax:	<i> text here </i>
Example:	This is italic
<s> </s>, <strike> </strike>
Description:	Renders the text it contains with a strike-through character.
Attributes:	none
Syntax:	<s> text here </s>
Example:	This is strike-through text
<small> </small>
Description:	Renders the text it contains one size smaller than the default size.
Attributes:	none
Syntax:	<small> text here </small>
Example:	This is small text
<sub> </sub>
Description:	Renders the text it contains as a subscript to the preceding text.
Attributes:	none
Syntax:	<sub> text here </sub>
Example:	This is a subscript
<sup> </sup>
Description:	Renders the text it contains as a superscript to the preceding text.
Attributes:	none
Syntax:	<sup> text here </sup>
Example:	This is a superscript
<tt> </tt>
Description:	Renders the text it contains as a fixed width, using Courier. Stands for teletyped.
Attributes:	none
Syntax:	<tt> text here </tt>
Example:	This is teletyped text
<u> </u>
Description:	Renders the text it contains with an underline beneath it.
Attributes:	none
Syntax:	<u> text here </u>
Example:	This is underlined text

     That's it for the text-level format tags. Keep in mind that a lot of these tags have been deprecated by the W3C, and are asked to use stylesheets instead. For information about stylesheets, check out our stylesheets tutorial.