Topic 1: Two Groups of Text Control
One of the more important topics from chapter 12 on text is the general idea that there are two groups that control the apperance of text, those directly affecting the font and those that have the same effect no matter the font. The first group controls things such as typeface selection, bolding, italicizing, and sizing. The second group controls more of the simple visuals such as, the coloring of different text elements, the spacing between words and letters, and overal formatting of paragraphs.
Topic 2: Definition Lists
This is my favorite topic from both chapters because it is so useful, a definition list is a list type specfically for definitions and provides the layout for you without the use of CSS. The setup involves two steps, first you incase everything in a <dl> which sets up the format to accept the list tiems. The second part includes the list items but in this list they are called; <dt> which stands for the term that will be defined, and <dd> for the definition of the term. The code organizes the list with indents, adding spacing and line breaks where needed. You can even have multiple terms per definition and multiple definitions per word if that is needed!
Topic 3: Pseudo-Classes
Pseudo-classes are very important to making a user friendly website as for they allow the user to view when their cursur is interacting with certain elements. The most useful classes are :link, which informs how your hyperlinks will display, :visited, which allows you to change the display of an item after it has been previously visited, and :hover, which allows you to change the display of an object when the users cursor is hovering over it. All of these classes will help extremely with the usabilty and user friendliness of your site, that are small details but very powerful and not to be overlooked.