Character-level tags are like italics or bold in your word processor. They are styles that can be applied to individual characters, and do not have to affect an entire paragraph.
Like paragraph level tags, where you want to use tags that “mean something”, you don’t want to use simply “italics” to italicize both emphasized text and citations. You’ll want to use the tag for emphasis when you want the text emphasized, and for citations when you are “italicizing” a citation reference.
Character Tags: Emphasis
On paper, italics are probably most often used to emphasize text. They’re a typographical tool for printing. On the web, many of your browsers are not viewing your page on a piece of paper; many are not viewing it at all. Instead of using italics, you can use emphasis. On visual displays, emphasis will be displayed as italic. Search engines can recognize emphasized text and rank it differently than normal text. And alternative browsers such as audio browsers can alter their output to emphasize the text in a manner appropriate to their “viewers”. An audio browser will change its inflection over the emphasized text, for example.
Character Tags: Strong
You have two levels of emphasis available to you: emphasis, and a stronger emphasis. The stronger emphasis is usually displayed in bold when visually rendered.
Typographical Tags
If you don’t mean to emphasize the text, but merely want typographical tags that do not affect search engine placement, vocalization, or other forms of display emphasis, you can use the italics, bold, and other typographical tags from the “Text Style” menu item under the “Format” menu.
Character Tags: Your Page
Apply some emphasis to words or phrases on your page. If you don’t have any text that requires emphasis, add some sentences with some words that do require emphasis.
