Web Design in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Working with HTML Text

Formatting web page text is not like formatting text for print. In print, you have the luxury of knowing that text will stay where you put it. Web text, on the other hand, is more fluid. Many aspects of presentation are determined when the document flows into each user’s browser window.

After establishing the skeleton of the document (see Chapter 9), a good place to begin formatting a web document is to establish the general structure of the contents by adding HTML tags that create paragraphs and heading levels in the raw text.

Paragraphs and Line Breaks

A browser starts a new paragraph or adds a line break only if it encounters a tag in the HTML source file that explicitly tells it to do so. Otherwise, it ignores the carriage returns and extra spaces in the HTML document. Without tags, all content in the HTML document wraps automatically to fill the width of the browser window. So even if you have written out your content with line spaces between the paragraphs, it will display as one block of text if it is not formatted with the appropriate HTML tags.

Paragraphs are the most rudimentary elements of a text document. In HTML they are indicated by enclosing a span of text in paragraph tags (<p>...</p>). A paragraph is an example of a block-level element . When browsers see block element tags, they start a new line and add an amount of extra space above and below the element. Other examples of block elements include headings (<h1> ), blockquotes (<blockquote> ...