Chapter 45. Changing the Look of a Text Element

In CSS, the simplest style selector is just the name of an HTML tag. The style definition for this simple selector determines how the browser displays the element wherever it appears on the page:

 h1 {   font-family: Arial;   font-weight: bold; } p {   font-family: Verdana; } 

So it goes for redefining the generic appearance of HTML text tags. But CSS allows you to choose much more specific selectors for entire sequences of tags to get precisely the typographical effect you have in mind, as Table 45.1 shows.

Table 45.1. CSS Selectors for HTML Tags

SELECTOR	DESCRIPTION	EXAMPLE SYNTAX	EXAMPLE DESCRIPTION
Simple	All HTML tags of a type	p	All paragraphs
Contextual	All HTML tags of a type that are somewhere within a tag of another type	table em	All emphasis tags that appear somewhere inside a table
Child[*]	All HTML tags of a type that have as their immediate parent a tag of another type	td > p	All paragraphs that have table cells as their immediate parents
Sibling[*]	All HTML tags of a type that follow a tag of another type but aren't the children of this other tag	h1 + p	All paragraphs that immediately follow first-level heads

^[*] These selectors don't always work very well in IE.