HTML tag

❮ Prev Next ❯

The tag is one of the HTML5 elements. It marks a part of the text which has relevance. It can be used to highlight text for showing emphasis, highlight search terms in search results to provide context; or distinguish new content added by user showing it differently.

In the Chrome and Firefox the tag content is marked in yellow, but it can be changed with the CSS background-color property .

The tag doesn’t have semantic content. In order to show the importance of the marked text, use the or tags.

Never use the tag for syntax highlighting. For this, you can use the HTML tag with appropriate CSS properties.

The tag can be used for indicating a particular part of the content relevant to the current activity of the user, like indicating the words matching a search operation.

Syntax

The tag comes in pairs. The content is written between the opening () and closing () tags.

Example of the HTML tag:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Title of the document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Learn HyperText markup language (HTML) on <mark>W3Docs.com</mark> website.</p>
  </body>
</html>

Try it Yourself »

Result

The and other HTML tags

A list of some HTML elements that have similarities with the element is presented below. Let’s go through each of them.

The HTML tag

You can use the tag for indicating text or part of the text that is very important. For example an error or a warning. It will appear as bold.

The HTML tag

The tag has some similarities with . It appears as bold too. The main difference is that the element doesn’t indicate any importance. It is used for design purposes.

The HTML tag

We use the tag to stress emphasis on a specific word. It appears as italics.

Attributes

The tag supports the Global attributes and the Event Attributes.

How to style tag?

Common properties to alter the visual weight/emphasis/size of text in tag:

CSS font-style property sets the style of the font. normal | italic | oblique | initial | inherit.
CSS font-family property specifies a prioritized list of one or more font family names and/or generic family names for the selected element.
CSS font-size property sets the size of the font.
CSS font-weight property defines whether the font should be bold or thick.
CSS text-transform property controls text case and capitalization.
CSS text-decoration property specifies the decoration added to text, and is a shorthand property for text-decoration-line, text-decoration-color, text-decoration-style.

Coloring text in tag:

CSS color property describes the color of the text content and text decorations.
CSS background-color property sets the background color of an element.

Text layout styles for tag:

CSS text-indent property specifies the indentation of the first line in a text block.
CSS text-overflow property specifies how overflowed content that is not displayed should be signalled to the user.
CSS white-space property specifies how white-space inside an element is handled.
CSS word-break property specifies where the lines should be broken.

Other properties worth looking at for tag:

CSS text-shadow property adds shadow to text.
CSS text-align-last property sets the alignment of the last line of the text.
CSS line-height property specifies the height of a line.
CSS letter-spacing property defines the spaces between letters/characters in a text.
CSS word-spacing property sets the spacing between words.