Overview of Character-Level Elements

Character level elements are used to specify either the structural meaning or the physical appearence of marked text without causing a paragraph break. Like most other elements, character level elements include both start and end tags. Only the characters between the tags are effected. For example:

    This is <EM>emphasized</EM> text.

Highlighting elements are allowed within the content of other highlighting elements, but implementations are not required to render these nested highlighting elements distinctly from non-nested elements. For example, implementations may render the following two cases identically:

    plain <B>bold <I>italic</I></B>

    plain <B>bold </B><I>italic</I>

Some character highlighting styles are more explicit than others about how they should be physically represented. Designate the information type rather than the character format wherever possible, unless for example, it is necessary to refer to the text as in "The italic parts are mandatory".

Permitted Attributes

ID

An SGML identifier used as the target for hypertext links or for naming particular elements in associated style sheets. Identifiers are NAME tokens and must be unique within the scope of the current document.

LANG

This is one of the ISO standard language abbreviations, e.g. "en.uk" for the variation of English spoken in the United Kingdom. It can be used by parsers to select language specific choices for quotation marks, ligatures and hypenation rules etc. The language attribute is composed from the two letter language code from ISO 639, optionally followed by a period and a two letter country code from ISO 3166.

CLASS

This a space separated list of SGML NAME tokens and is used to subclass tag names. By convention, the class names are interpreted hierarchically, with the most general class on the left and the most specific on the right, where classes are separated by a period. The CLASS attribute is most commonly used to attach a different style to some element, but it is recommended that where practical class names should be picked on the basis of the element's semantics, as this will permit other uses, such as restricting search through documents by matching on element class names. The conventions for choosing class names are outside the scope of this specification.