I’m going to use this entry to try to illustrate for myself and others an example of what web standards permit. Using CSS you can define rules for a series of ”heading” tags – h1 through h6 – with h1 being the largest and boldest. While I never specified to the designer of this weblog what I wanted the headings to look like, here’s how CSS causes them to appear:

Here’s what h1 looks like.

Here’s what h2 looks like.

Here’s what h3 looks like.

Here’s what h4 looks like.

Here’s what h5 looks like.

Here’s what h6 looks like.

But, this raises questions…

First, what if I wanted each of the headings to be used for something other than headings. What if I simply wanted to mix fonts, sizes and emphasis in my writing? Could I specify a different font, size and emphasis level for each of these? I think those who are advocating web standards, CSS and XHTML will answer, ”yes.”

Second, doesn’t this remove the risk that I might put something in a weblog entry that would invalidate the whole page? If I properly define these ”headings” for the type of writing and emphasis I expect to be doing, can’t I insure that everything is valid CSS and XHTML?

Here’s a sentence that needs some emphasis

on a few words followed by something that needs to be

emphasized a different way.

* * * UPDATE * * * Well, as you can see, none of that was expected. I have no idea why the various headings are so radically different from one another. I also don’t understand why the sentence is broken up into sections based upon having different heading tags in it. I had hoped that I might be able to use this feature (is it a feature?) to select something like h6 for small courier type that could represent XHTML markup that I wanted to ask questions about. No such luck.

This isn’t what I expected to get after reading Zeldman’s book last night. Now, where’s that tutor I need so desperately?

* * * UPDATE #2 * * * I just viewed the source code at www.zeldman.com. I find use of the tag called ”code.” So if I want to illustrate how I caused this portion of this sentence to look different from the rest of the sentence, can I use the [code] tag? We’ll see.