Below are examples of the common character-formatting tags. Divided into two groups; Physical tags and Logical tags. The appearance of HTML text formatted with physical character-attribute tags is more likely to remain constant from one browser to another, much like the direct formatting you would apply to text in a word processor eg. bold. The appearance of HTML text formatted with logical character-attribute tags, however, depends upon the browser's interpretation of that logical character-attribute tag, much like a style in a word processor.
The idea behind logical styles is that they can be rendered in the best way for that particular platform. For example, if you want to emphasize a word, <em> might produce italics in a browser, but on a text-to-speech system, it could be rendered by shouting!
This is how the tags display by default on your browser. Of course, you can override them using CSS, which is what I've done on the other pages on this site. So to be able to display this page I had to ditch my common stylesheet!
Physical Tags should not vary from browser to browser.
<I>...</I> - Italic
<U>...</U> - Underscore (deprecated under HTML 4.0)
<TT>...</TT> - Creates typewriter (fixed-width) font.
<S>...</S> - Strikeout (deprecated under HTML 4.0)
<DFN>...</DFN> - Definition, marks defining (first) occurrence of term.
<BLINK>...</BLINK> - Blinking text (Netscape specific)
Logical tags denote areas as being of a certain style and could be rendered differently according to the platform being used.
<Hn>...</Hn> - Heading (1..6)
<EM>...</EM> - Emphasis (usually italic)
<STRONG>...</STRONG> - Strong (usually bold)
<ADDRESS>...</ADDRESS> - Encloses information about the author and the document (usually italic)
<CODE>...</CODE> - Marks a piece of computer source code and is often displayed in a fixed-width font.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog! 0123456789<KBD>...</KBD> - Shows an example of keyboard entry or user input.
<SAMP>...</SAMP> - Shows literal characters, such as computer output.
<CITE>...</CITE> - Marks a citation of a book, article, movie, and so on and is often displayed in italics.
<BIG>...</BIG> - Makes text one size larger.
<SMALL>...</SMALL> - Makes text one size smaller.
<SUP>...</SUP> - Renders text as superscript.
<SUB>...</SUB> - Renders text as subscript.
<ABBR>...</ABBR> - Logically denotes abbreviations and acronyms.
<Q>...</Q> - Denotes a short inline quotation.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog! 0123456789
<VAR>...</VAR> - Shows the name of a variable. Often displayed as italic.
<DEL>...</DEL> - Indicates that text has been deleted from the current revision. MSIE Only. (See <INS>)
<INS>...</INS> - Indicates that text has been inserted in the document since the last revision. MSIE Only. (See <DEL>)