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§7.2.5

Highlighted Text

Highlighter over text—how is the colour kept?

✅ NormativeSettled. The requirement holds as written.📄 Page ruleCan be applied from the page alone.Read §7.2.5 in the RFC ↗

The requirement

Highlighted text MUST be wrapped in <mark> carrying the highlighter colour as an attribute: <mark style="background-color: yellow">the highlighted phrase</mark>.

When it applies

Text printed on a highlighter background is content, not decoration. The highlight MUST NOT be dropped, and MUST NOT be reduced to bold or italic.

Sketch of the printed page — layout, not output
<mark style="background-color: yellow">the highlighted phrase</mark>

Reading the examples. Each one pairs a source page with the output the rule expects. ✅ Sample: the rule applies. ❌ Counter-sample: it looks like it applies and does not, or a rendering got it wrong. A non-conforming output, in red, is shown only for contrast. … marks content left out of an excerpt.

The point, in a small example

The source shows the printed appearance; the output shows the precise markup required by this convention. These pages are made up to isolate the rule.

01

✅ SampleConstructedThe rule applies

A yellow highlight has its own markup

Preserve the yellow background as a highlight; it does not imply bold or meaningful yellow text.

Source page
Highlighted Text — A yellow highlight has its own markup. Source page.
Non-conforming output

What the rule rules out.

Markdown
Bring **photo ID** tomorrow.
Expected output
Markdown
Bring <mark style="background-color: yellow">photo ID</mark> tomorrow.
Highlighted Text · Source page

A yellow highlight has its own markup

Highlighted Text — A yellow highlight has its own markup. Source page.

Requirements

  • The colour MUST be named with the nearest HTML colour name — yellow, green, cyan, magenta, lightgray — not a hex value or an invented label. That keeps the vocabulary finite and matches the treatment of colour in Text Colors (§7.3.12) and Color as the Value (§9.6.4).
  • The <mark> MUST cover exactly the run of text that carries the background. If the highlight stops mid-sentence, so does the <mark>.
  • Inside a table, only the cells whose background is actually coloured are marked; a whole row or column MUST NOT be marked because part of it is highlighted — the same over-application problem as Bold and Italic Inside Tables (§9.6.2).

Why keep the colour

In a reviewed document, different highlight colours usually mean different things — one reviewer per colour, or one category per colour. A bare <mark> collapses that distinction and there is no way to recover it afterwards.

More

Rule id text-highlighted-text · text formatting color