This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Applying Text Styles
With regard to applying text styles to your i-mode pages, you should be warned that i-mode microbrowsers are greatly limited by the type of fonts and style of text that are available. For that reason, many of the text styles that are often employed for use on a desktop browser cannot be displayed within the i-mode microbrowser.
In addition, the XHTML Basic specification is designed for use within a variety of small appliances, not just i-mode handsets. Some of these small devices may not even have a user interface; they could be voice-activated and be capable of communicating with a user by synthesized voice. For instance, a future portable MP3 audio player could interact with a music service on the Web to download not only music files, but also XHTML Basic documents from all over the Internet. These files could contain lyrics, credits, and other information about the songs and artists you like.
When asked to think of text style within a Web document, often people respond with the ideas of bold, italicized, and underlined text. However, how would these styles be translated to text that is read by synthesized voice? What would bold or underlined text sound like? To deal with these considerations, XHTML Basic supports text styles that are a bit more abstract than bold and underlined.
The two most common style elements within the Text Module of XHTML Basic are strong and em (emphasis). There are no hard-and-fast definitions about how these should be used. As a developer, however, strong is typically used for bold text and em for italicized text. This is the way that desktop browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer display the formatted text for these elements.
Figure 1 shows the display of the following sentence using an example of both the <em> and <strong> tags:
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This is <em>emphasis</em> and this is <strong>strong</strong> text.
Figure 1 - Most microbrowsers support a limited choice of text styles.
You see that due to the display and font limitations of the Pixo Microbrowser, the emphasis text was not formatted in italicized letters.
In a situation in which the document was read using a synthesized voice, such as the MP3 player example mentioned above, text formatted as emphasis could be read in a different tone of voice that unformatted or strong text. So it is important to begin to think of your XHTML Basic documents in a larger context than simply a page that will be read by a user within an i-mode handset.