In this article we are going to look at a useful mechanism for applying styles to sections of text. While it is easy enough to style blocks of text using standard Android styles, there is also a mechanism for applying styles to text at a sub-block level. In HTML it is possible to add <strong>emphasis</strong> by applying inline markup as shown in this sentence. In Android we can apply a style to a TextView widget which will apply a given style to a specific block of text, but what if we want finer grained control like that of HTML? We use Spans: a mechanism for applying different styles to a block of text to character level.