The text-top and text-bottom keyword align to the tallest and lowest character, respectively.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xml:lang='en'> <head> <title>vertical-align</title> <style rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> p { font: 12px sans-serif; } span.line { border: 1px solid rgb(200, 200, 200); background: rgb(244, 244, 244); font-size: 100px; } span.line span { vertical-align: 300%; font-size: 20px; background: white; border: 1px solid black; } span#text-bottom { vertical-align: text-bottom; } </style> </head> <body> <p> <span class='line'> CSS <span id='text-bottom'>Text Bottom</span> </span> </p> </body> </html>