all that convincing and quickly become tiresome. Just use italics in body text
when you want to add emphasis.
One special exception: Sprinkle boldface in body text if you want to give the
reader a way to quickly scan some text. The bold words act like mini-head-
lines embedded within the text. The classic example of this technique is the
gossip column where the names of the celebrities are bold. You can use this
approach in corporate reports, travel advertisements, or anywhere else
where you aren’t using subheads, yet you want to give the reader an efficient
way to skim through the text and locate topics of interest.
Although their use in body text should be limited, boldface, all-caps, and
underlining are often useful in headlines and can add necessary variety to
your page designs.
Specifying Font Weight .................................................................................
When you want to adjust the weight (the darkness, boldness, or lightness),
you can resort to these relative CSS values: normal, bold, bolder, lighter,
100 , 200 , 300 , 400 , 500 , 600 , 700 , 800 , 900 , inherit. The higher the number,
the bolder the font weight. Most often, simply use the boldvalue:
H2 {font-weight: bold;}
The values from 100 to 900 are merely indications of the desired weight, but
few user typefaces have this many weights. Although this scheme has no
absolutes, you can think of weights 100-300as roughly equivalent to “light”
faces, such as Copperplate Gothic Light, 400-500as regular (the CSS value
normal), and 600-900as bold. However, if a typeface has weight distinctions
such as bold, ultrabold, and so on, the numeric weight values add more
specificity.
You can use the values lighteror bolderto specify a boldness relative to
the element’s parent element, like this:
body {font-weight: bold;}
p {font-weight: bolder;}
In this case, <body>elements are bold, but <p>elements are, if possible, dis-
played in an even heavier face. Times New Roman has no weight beyond
bold, so a boldervalue has no effect. However, in the following case, text
outside <p>tags is regular, and text inside <p>tags is made bold:
body {font-weight: regular;}
p {font-weight: bolder;}
Chapter 5: All About Text 95
