A BASEFONT element advises the browser of some font information to be used as the basis for text rendering of the current page below the BASEFONT element. You can apply this element in either the HEAD or BODY portion of the document (although Microsoft recommends in the BODY only for IE 4), and you can insert BASEFONT elements as often as is needed to set the base font for a portion of the document. Be aware that settings of the BASEFONT element do not necessarily apply to content in tables. If you want table content to resemble a custom BASEFONT setting, you likely have to set the font styles to table elements separately.

The BASEFONT element overrides the default font settings in the browser's user preferences settings. Like most font-related elements, the BASEFONT element is deprecated in HTML 4.0 in favor of style sheets. The latter provide much greater control over fonts (see ).

Sets the font color of all text below the BASEFONT element. Even though the attribute made its HTML recommendation debut in Version 4.0, the attribute is nonetheless deprecated.

You can assign a hierarchy of font faces to use for the default font of a section headed by a BASEFONT element. The browser looks for the first font face in the comma-delimited list of font face names until it either finds a match in the client system or runs out of choices, at which point the browser default font face is used. Font face names must match the system font face names exactly. If you use this attribute (instead of the preferred style sheet attribute), you can always suggest a generic font face (serif, sans-serif) as the final choice.

In IE 3, this attribute was called the NAME attribute.

This was IE 3's version of what is today the FACE attribute. It accepts a single font face as a value. The NAME attribute is no longer used.

Font sizes referenced by the SIZE attribute are on a relative size scale that is not tied to any one point size across operating system platforms. The default browser font size is 3. The range of acceptable values for the SIZE attribute are integers from 1 to 7 inclusive. The exact point size varies with the operating system and browser design.

Users can often adjust the default font size in preferences settings. The SIZE attribute overrides that setting. Moreover, SIZE values can be relative to whatever font size is set in the preferences. By preceding an attribute value with a + or - sign, the browser's default size can be adjusted upward or downward, but always within the range of 1 through 7.