Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

Text Styles

The simple formatting applied by a paragraph format isn’t much to write home about, much less to advertise on a résumé. Browsers generally display a Heading 1, for instance, in black and bold using a large Times New Roman font. As mentioned in the Headlines section on Headlines, this type of paragraph formatting is intended to provide structure, not good looks.

In the next chapter you’ll learn how to make your web pages stand out using Cascading Style Sheets. With CSS you can apply different fonts, colors, and sizes to your text. However, you can also apply a handful of HTML tags to a selection of text. Dreamweaver refers to these as styles, but in reality they’re intended to provide more information about the text—for example, if you have a “Learn HTML” web page, you can apply the code tag to programming code that you want to display in a unique format on the page.

As shown in Figure 3-8 HTML offers a host of different text styles, some of which fulfill obscure purposes. For instance, the Code and Variable styles are intended to format programming code, while the Sample style represents the output from a computer program—not exactly styles you’ll need often in promoting, say, your Cheeses of the World mail-order company.

To use these styles, select the text (using any of the methods described on Selecting Text), and then apply a format from the Format→Style menu. (You can also use the Property inspector to apply the <strong> or <em> tags to emphasize text by making it ...