HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Chapter 5. Rules, Images, and Multimedia

While the body of most documents is text, an appropriate seasoning of horizontal rules, images, and other multimedia elements makes for a much more inviting and attractive document. These features are not simply gratuitous geegaws that make your documents look pretty, mind you. Multimedia elements bring HTML and XHTML documents alive, providing a dimension of valuable information often unavailable in other media, such as print. In this chapter, we describe in detail how you can insert special multimedia elements into your documents, when their use is appropriate, and how to avoid overdoing it.

You also might want to jump ahead and skim Chapter 12, where we describe some catchall tags (the HTML 4 and XHTML standard <object> and the popular browsers' <embed>) that let you insert all kinds of content and datafile types, including multimedia, into your documents.

Horizontal Rules

Horizontal rules give you a way to separate sections of your document visually. That way, you give readers a clean, consistent, visual indication that one portion of your document has ended and another portion has begun. Horizontal rules effectively set off small sections of text, delimit document headers and footers, and provide extra visual punch to headings within your document.

The <hr> Tag

The <hr> tag tells the browser to insert a horizontal rule across the display window. With HTML, it has no end tag. For XHTML, include the end-tag slash (/) symbol as the last character ...