html - What does font size -2 mean here?

Question

I see this from source code of a web site:

<font size="-2">@2009 </font>

What does it mean when size is negative?

Answer 1

That is a deprecated style of markup. Nobody should be using it anymore.

Back in the old days, before CSS, you could use the <font> tag to control the relative size of text on the page. A "-2" simply meant two sizes smaller than your base font size.

Font sizes ranged from 1 to 7 in first generation browsers, if I recall correctly.