Is it possible to highlight (or do something to) specific words, or regular expressions?
I'm going for a no-javascript solution here, but it might not be possible.
3 Answers
You will need JavaScript to do this. I recommend using a strong tag rather than span but either will work. This will replace all first words. You can replace the ^\w with whatever is meaningful.
$('a').each(function() { var me = $(this); me.html( me.text().replace(/(^\w+)/,'<strong>$1</strong>') ); }); 
Comments
Best you can hope for is encapsulating the words in a span with a class to do some sort of highlighting. You could do this server side based on search results by using a simple regex compare to replace the searched for string with that string again wrapped with a span. It is not possible, so far as I know, to do this solely with CSS.
Comments
No it's not, you would have to use spans.
<p>foo<b>bar</b></p>?