Here's My Big Bold Title

<BIG> and <SMALL> to change font size

It doesn't give you as much control as actually specifying the font size does, but the <BIG> and <SMALL> tags do an OK job of making words or phrases bigger or smaller, like so:

Here's My Big Title code: <BIG>Here's My Big Title</BIG> Here's My Small Title code: <SMALL>Here's My Small Title</SMALL>

You may ask, "Big or small compared to what?" Good question, and here's the answer: There's a thing called BASEFONT which will control the default font size of your HTML text on the whole page, if you so choose. So the <BIG> and <SMALL> tags make your text big or small in relation to whatever you've set the BASEFONT to be. Read more about all this in the section on font size.

<B> for bold

This one's pretty obvious. Gif Girl uses it to make HTML text stand out in any number of instances. You can use it for headlines by coupling it with a font size increase. Want to make your links appear bolder than life? Place the bold tag around your link tags. The possibilities are endless! Here's how it looks:

Here's My Bold Text code: <B>Here's My Bold Text</B>

As with almost all HTML tags, it's vital that you close your bold tag, or all text following the opening bold tag will be bold, and you don't want that.

<I> for italics

Gif Girl has a moral dilemma with this one, since she doesn't want to deprive her fellow Web designers of knowledge, but — particularly at small font sizes — italics can be very hard to read, and just plain ugly! (Which is why you don't see italics much on Tripod.) Still, here's an example:

Here's My Italicized Text code: <I>Here's My Italicized Text</I>