 <p>TextViews can only contain a small subset of HTML tags not CSS. These tags include <code>&lt;strong&gt;</code>, <code>&lt;underline</code>>, <code>&lt;emphasis</code>>, <code>&lt;p&gt;</code>, <code>&lt;small&gt;</code>, <code>&lt;medium&gt;</code> etc. There are a few others as well. </p> <p>You can change the font and font colour by doing something like</p> <pre><code>&lt;p font-color="blue"&gt;This is my blue text&lt;/p&gt; </code></pre> <p>but you can't add CSS. If you need to do formatting in this way that would require CSS then a webview would be better. </p>