The only exception to this is the vertical-alignproperty, which can be
valuable if you need to make text superscript or subscript. This topic is cov-
ered in Chapter 7.However, for the sake of completion, I briefly cover some of the nasty, spooky
things you can do via repositioning and otherwise molesting perfectly good
text. (Never let it be said that you don’t get your money’s worth from a... For Dummiesbook.) This section of the chapter should serve more as a
warning than a guide.
Inline elements, unlike block elements, are generally rather small and, as
their name suggests, in a line of text. You can insert nonreplaced elements
such as strong(which makes text darker) or drop in replaced elements like
an image. (Replaced elements are those such as an image, where the content
is inserted on the fly, rather than existing in the code itself. A nonreplaced
element, on the other hand, is a word of text: It’s in the actual code of the
Web page, so it doesn’t need to be replaced by content in some outside file.)You can take a perfectly good paragraph of text and mess it up by adding an
inline element, a spanin this case, defined with a CSS border, as shown in
Figure 11-6:The crime in Figure 11-6 was committed by this code:<html>
<head><style>span {border: 3px dotted;}Figure 11-6:
A border
stuck into
some text.
It’s like a
necklace
around a
parrot’s
neck — it
catches
your eye,
and then it
looks
ridiculous.