Using Textual Modifiers

Textual modifier tags can be understood to be tags that give logical structure to phrases in your HTML document. This structure is normally presented to the user by changing the appearance of the text.

We have seen in the Introduction to this book how we can emphasize text by using <em></em> tags. Graphical browsers normally present emphasized text in italics. Screen readers, browsers which read the page to the user, speak emphasized words with a different inflection.

A common mistake is to confuse the appearance of the element in your preferred browser for the meaning of the element. This is one reason why you should use more than one browser to test your pages. Ideally you would use a graphical browser, a text-only browser and a screen reader.

You can change the default presentation for any element using Cascading Style Sheets. For example if you wanted all emphasized text to appear in red normal text you would use the following CSS rule: