What about using BIG and SMALL tags?
Todd Fahrner notes that using the HTML tags BIG and SMALL gives the most consistent and robust results when setting font sizes in Web pages for version 3 browsers and above. (Beyond the FONT tag: Practical HTML text styling ). The BIG and SMALL tags are extremely easy to implement.The following example sets the text one step larger than the default:
<big>some text</big>
Similarly, the following sets the text one step smaller:
<small>some text</small>
Visit Todd Fahrner website for further examples.
The BIG and SMALL tags are user scalable, so there are no serious accessibility issues that I am aware of; I would not counsel you against using them. However there are a few issues you should consider:
- BIG and SMALL have little meaning beyond visual presentation.
- It is an inefficient method for setting text sizes on large sites; to re-size text at a later date will require a lot of 'find-and-replace' work.
- It is less flexible than using CSS to set text sizes as presentation and structure are not clearly divorced.
If we are interested in moving towards the goal of divorcing content from the presentation of that content, these tags would more usefully be replaced with attributes declared in a separate style sheet.
However, BIG and SMALL are perfectly legal HTML elements, and they may be just what you want in terms of setting consistent cross-browser text sizes.
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