If all of the text in a print or online output looked the same, it would be more difficult to read. Formatting selections of content not only makes the text easier to read, but also easier to comprehend. For example, you may want to show all scripting commands in a font that is different from the body text, or you may want to bold and shade the heading row for tables. When using formatting, it is important to establish a set of standards so that the formatting is applied consistently and communicates the same usage to readers.
When formatting web page content, you should consider using styles rather than applying each attribute individually. A style is a container for pre-defined formatting instructions that controls the attributes of a specific web page element. Elements are HTML tagged structural parts of a web page. They include paragraphs, bulleted and numbered lists, headings, tables, spans of formatted text, and so on.
The manual application of each formatting attribute to each element in a web page is called direct formatting. There are many advantages to using styles over direct formatting. For example, you want to format web page subheadings for a Tahoma, 12 point, blue text color, bold font with a 24 point indent. To manually apply those formatting attributes would take at least five separate steps. By storing those formatting instructions in a style, all of the formatting attributes are applied when you perform the single step of applying that style to your subheading text. After creating the style, it is now available for use in other web pages, and can be shared with other authors. Styles also make it easy to change formatting because you have tagged all the text of the same element type for a particular style. If you decide to change the format, you only need to change the attributes of the style to change all instances of text tagged with that style.
Styles are applied to text or elements in a web page either by manually applying the style or by default. When you create a default style for an element, the style and its formatting are automatically applied when you add that element to a web page. For example, if you always format tables with a gray background for row and column header cells, you can create a default table style with those attributes; this change affects all new tables that you add to a web page and all existing tables that use the default table style. You can create multiple styles for the same web page element. For instance, you may want to create multiple paragraph styles with different font and spacing attributes.
While it takes some initial effort to create your styles, in the long run, styles save you a great deal of time. Styles also contribute to the creation of professional looking content by enforcing consistency; ensuring that all content has the same look and feel.
Note: You should be judicious in your use of any formatting, as over-formatting loses its impact. Plan your formatting strategy by creating standards.