lucy24 - 4:50 pm on Jul 16, 2012 (gmt 0)

Inline style tags are the absolute last resort. Your defaults belong in the css:

p {font-family: sans-serif;}

and so on. (Please do not set your default paragraph at something smaller than 100%. It makes it hard for the user and they'll just have to resize, messing up your design.)

Yes, my boilerplate for h1, h2... lists absolutely everything. I generally don't use boldface in headings; I just make them bigger. My default size for an h5 is 100% and it goes outward from there, so they're all bigger than the browser norm.

I think you can safely assume that no browser is going to make an ordinary paragraph bold or italic by default, so you don't need to say anything about it. If I'm doing something with italic body text-- in practice, more often an e-book than an ordinary page element-- I'll wrap it in a predefined div to italicize the whole thing. (And redefine something like ".ital em {font-style: normal}" to toggle appropriately.)

Is there some reason you can't use a style sheet? Your posts seem to imply you can't; normally this would only be the case if you're inserting material into someone else's page. Even then, you can wrap the whole thing in a div and style the div.