A bit about the FONT tag.
This page will deal with some of the basic ways of varying the FONT tag, but will not go as far as style sheets. The following parameters for the FONT tag should definately work with Netscape and Explorer, but may not work with other browsers. Reliance on the FONT tag will be less and less common in the future as more sites and designers switch to Cascading Style Sheets for control of text layout. But for older browsers, you may still want to use the FONT tag.

The first thing that you may want to do with the FONT tag is vary the size of text. This is something that was possible starting with Netscape 1.1. The thing to know is that FONT sizes are measured with the numbers 1-7, with 4 being whatever your default font size is. Meaning, whatever your browser is set with for the default proportional font, that is equal to 4 in the relative font sizes. Smaller numbers will come out smaller in size, and vice versa.

So there are a couple of ways to vary font sizes:

<font size=5>Some bigger text.</font> or <font size=+1>Some bigger text.</font> Both will yield something like this.
So you can get some nifty visual effects varying font size from character to character or word to word this way, but it gets fairly typing-intensive.

More recently (3.0), the FONT tag began to support additional parameters such as FACE and COLOR. The FACE tag allows you to specify which font family a block of text will appear in, assuming that those fonts are installed on the user's machine. Since the fonts have to be installed, you should generally pick fairly common font families. Additionally, font families have different names under the Mac and Windows operating systems, so generally you will want to list a couple of different familes. For example:

<font face=helvetica,arial size=6>This would appear in Helvetica or Arial.</font> The COLOR tag works as you would expect it to. You type in either a hex number for a color, or one of the sixteen named colors, and your text will appear in that color. As with other tags, you can stack these different parameters up to get custom sizes, fonts, and colors all on the same text.

Building Web Sites - ITP Winter 1999 - Mike Cosaboom, Instructor
mc39@acf2.nyu.edu