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You have learned well, Grasshopper. However, you answered the wrong question. Everything that you said--including the material I snipped for length--was well put and well reasoned. For print.
However, Kirsty is asking about HTML Help, not a print publication.
So let's get down to cases.
In the first place, Kirsty, you can specify fonts till the cows come home. If those fonts are not installed and active on the client computer, though, the user will not see them.
You may be working on Help for an application that runs in a controlled corporate environment, in which case you may indeed know that Verdana and Garamond are installed. If your application is intended for use on multiple platforms, though, you really don't know that. All you really know is that there is at least one serif font and at least one sans serif font and at least one monospace font. And from the point of view of W3C, that's all you really need to know.
What I tell our developers (for a Web application) and what I practice on our Web site is this: for text (as opposed to graphics, where anything goes), the only appropriate HTML font specification (in a style sheet, of course) is "Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif." The reason I don't recommend Verdana, even though it really is a more legible face on screen than Arial, is that it sets a whole lot wider. So if you lay out a table or page with forced line breaks, assuming it is going to look a particular way, and the client computer does not have Verdana installed, the page geometry is going to go all to pieces.
Now, then, back to the question of emphasis. As Geoff says, use italics for emphasis. Yes, Geoff, this has been the practice for "more than a century." Two centuries is more than a century, right?
You can identify the names of things (like buttons or menu selections) with Initial Caps. You can identify logical operators with all caps (AND, OR). Save bold and bold italic for your headings.
Don't bother with Garamond or any other serif face. They break up so badly on low-resolution devices (all monitors are low-resolution devices) at text sizes, that you gain nothing by using them and lose much in the way of legibility.
Use Courier if you must for code examples or to simulate a UNIX shell. Otherwise, avoid it.
>
>Kirsty Taylor produces <<... online documentation in HTML Help format, all
>text is in Verdana font. At the moment, we use bold type for screen names
>and screen elements. If there are words in the text that need to be
>emphasised, bold + italic is used. Most of the style sources that I have
>recommend *not* using italic on screen.>>
>
>Bold is a poor choice for emphasis within running text because the page ends
>up looking like it was created with a leaky fountain pen, and the visual
>prominence of the boldfaced text draws the eyes. That's one reason why
>italic type was invented: italic faces designed for legibility rather than
>display differ just enough from the surrounding text to alert readers that a
>word is being used differently, but not so much as to distract the eye.
>(That's why it's been used in this way for more than a century in print
>publishing.) Provided Verdana italic is legible, it should be a good choice
>for emphasis.
>
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