Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Paragraph Formatting

Just as you use paragraphs to help organize your thoughts into clear, well-structured units when you write a paper or letter, you also organize content on web pages into blocks of information using HTML tags (see Of Tags and Properties for more about tags). The most basic block of information is the simple paragraph, which you identify in HTML with a paragraph tag, like this:

<p>Hello. This is a paragraph on a web page.</p>

A web browser considers everything between the opening <p> tag and the closing </p> tag as part of the same paragraph. You can apply many Dreamweaver formatting options—headlines, lists, indentations, and alignment, for example—only to full paragraphs rather than individual words. In a word processor, you call this kind of formatting paragraph formatting; in web design, it’s called block-level formatting. Either way, the idea is the same: The formatting you apply affects an entire paragraph (that is, a block of text, whether that block consists of just a single sentence or of several sentences). On the other hand, you can apply character-level formatting to individual words or even letters. Character-level formatting includes bold and italic attributes. In the world of HTML, inline elements, like the <strong> and the <em> tags, provide character-level formatting.

Paragraphs

If you create a new document in Dreamweaver and start typing right away, the text you type has no paragraph formatting at all, as indicated by the word “None” in the Format ...