Nancy Johnson wrote:

> I got a css style sheet from a client that we are going to develop and
> the following tags were included.  I had never seen them before
>
> ins
> kbd
> samp
>
> Can anyone tell me what they are used for and the best time to use

The defined meaning and best usage of HTML tags are issues outside the scope 
of this list. I'd recommend checking first the HTML specifications, then 
some guidance like http://www.htmlhelp.com on their usage. Those elements 
are not used much, but an organization may well have decided to use them on 
their website and therefore pay attention to their styling.

The styling issue is on-topic, and I think it needs to be noted first that 
typically kbd and samp are rendered by default in a monospace font. This may 
or may not be desirable. It basically reflects the old days when computer 
input and output appeared in a monospace font, and this "paradigm" might 
still be useful to convey a message. If you wish to override it, it is best 
to explicitly set font-family, since font-family: inherit does not work 
reliably (read: does not work on many IE versions still around).

Generally, if kbd markup is used, it's often a good idea to distinguish the 
kbd content (indicating keyboard input by user) from other content that 
might (or might not) appear in a monospace font. It's more or less customary 
to use bolding, but you might also consider using distinctive background 
color.

The ins element has no default styling different from normal rendering in 
old browsers, but modern browsers often display it as underlined. It's easy 
to override this by setting
ins { text-decoration: none; }
On the other hand, it's often useful to distinguish ins content (inserted 
text) from the rest, perhaps using some background color. If the documents 
are to be used on advanced browsers only, you could also insert some 
"insertion indicators" using ins:before and ins:after.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ 

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