Is it an usable practice to use <small> tag multiple times to make your text smaller?

Question

I am asking this just from curiosity.

If you use <small> tag three times, the word inside tag gets smaller 3 times as expected. Is this a useable practice or not, why?

<header>Lorem Ipsum <small><small><small>dolor sit amet</small></small></small></header>

Answer 1

It is generally bad for usability to reduce font size too much, and applying small three times on text that would otherwise be normal copy text reduces it beyond legibility to most people. But ignoring this aspect (and assuming e.g. that the font size would otherwise be very large due to the effect of other markup or CSS), the approach is safe.

HTML specifications have been rather vague about the effect of small elements and about nesting text-level elements, but all browsers that have any notion of font size variation in the first place (as opposite to speech browsers, character cell browsers, etc.) have implemented small as relative font size change. HTML5 drafts formalize this by the “suggested rendering” rule

small { font-size: smaller; }

Thus, nesting small elements is expected to cause cumulative reduction in font size, and actually does that. Browsers may impose a minimum font size, but this is a general feature and does not depend on the technique used to set font size.