If you want people to read what you have written, then structuring
your text well is even more important on the Web than when writing for
print. People have trouble reading wide, long, paragraphs of text on Web
sites unless they are broken up well.
This section will teach you basic text formatting elements like heading elements and paragraph elements.
Whitespace and Flow:
Before you start to mark up your text, it is best to understand what
HTML does when it comes across spaces and how browsers treat long
sentences and paragraphs of text.
You might think that if you put several consecutive spaces between
two words, the spaces would appear between those words onscreen, but
this is not the case; by default, only one space will be displayed. This
is known as white
space collapsing. So you need to use special HTML tags to create multiple spaces.
Similarly, if you start a new line in your source document, or you
have consecutive empty lines, these will be ignored and simply treated
as one space. So you need to use special HTML tags to create more number
of empty lines.
Create Headings - The <hn> Elements:
Any documents starts with a heading. You use different sizes for your
headings. HTML also have six levels of headings, which use the elements
<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and
<h6>. While displaying any heading, browser adds one line before
and after that heading.
Example:
<h1>This is heading 1</h1>
<h2>This is heading 2</h2>
<h3>This is heading 3</h3>
<h4>This is heading 4</h4>
<h5>This is heading 5</h5>
<h6>This is heading 6</h6>
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This will display following result:
This is heading 1
This is heading 2
This is heading 3
This is heading 4
This is heading 5
This is heading 6
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Create Paragraph - The <p> Element:
The <p> element offers a way to structure your text. Each
paragraph of text should go in between an opening <p> and closing
</p> tag as shown below in the example:
<p>Here is a paragraph of text.</p>
<p>Here is a second paragraph of text.</p>
<p>Here is a third paragraph of text.</p>
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This will produce following result:
Here is a paragraph of text.
Here is a second paragraph of text.
Here is a third paragraph of text.
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You can use
align attribute to align your paragraphs.
<p align="left">This is left aligned.</p>
<p align="center">This is center aligned.</p>
<p align="right">This is right aligned.</p>
<p align="justify">This is jutified. This works when you have
multiple lines in your paragraph and you want to justfy all the lines so
that they can look more nice.</p>
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This will produce following result:
This is left aligned.
This is center aligned.
This is right aligned.
This is jutified. This works when you have multiple
lines in your paragraph and you want to justfy all the lines so that
they can look more nice.
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Create Line Breaks - The <br /> Element:
Whenever you use the <br /> element, anything following it starts on the next line. This tag is an example of an
empty element, where you do not need opening and closing tags, as there is nothing to go in between them.
Note: The <br /> element has a space between the
characters br and the forward slash. If you omit this space, older
browsers will have trouble rendering the line break, while if you miss
the forward slash character and just use <br> it is not valid
XHTML
Example:
Hello<br />
You come most carefully upon your hour.<br />
Thanks<br />
Mahnaz
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This will produce following result:
Hello
You come most carefully upon your hour.
Thanks
Mahnaz
|
Centring Content - The <center> Element:
You can use <center> tag to put any content in the center of the page or any table cell.
Example:
<p>This is not in the center.</p>
<center>
<p>This is in the center.</p>
</center>
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This will produce following result:
This is not in the center.
This is in the center.
|
Nonbreaking Spaces:
Suppose you were to use the phrase "12 Angry Men." Here you would not
want a browser to split the "12" and "Angry" across two lines:
A good example of this technique appears in the movie "12 Angry Men."
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In cases where you do not want the client browser to break text, you
should use a nonbreaking space entity ( ) instead of a normal
space. For example, when coding the "12 Angry Men" paragraph, you would
use something similar to the following code:
<p>A good example of this technique appears in the movie "12 Angry Men."</p>
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Soft Hyphens:
Occasionally, you will want to allow a browser to hyphenate long
words to better justify a paragraph. For example, consider the following
code and its resulting output.
<p style="text-align: justify;"> The morbid fear of the number 13,
or triskaidekaphobia, has plagued some important historic figures like
Mahamiya and Nanao.</p>
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In cases where you want a client browser to be able to hyphenate a
word if necessary, use the soft hyphen entity (­) to specify
where a word should be hyphenated. So above example should be written as
follows:
<p style="text-align: justify;"> Example for soft hyphen - The
morbid fear of the number 13, or
tri­skai­deka­phobia, has plagued some important
historic figures like Mahamiya and Nanao.</p>
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This will produce following result:
Example for soft hyphen - The morbid
fear of the number 13, or triskaidekaphobia, has plagued some
important historic figures like Mahamiya and Nanao.
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NOTE: This may notwork with some web browsers.
Preserve Formatting - The <pre> Element:
Sometimes you want your text to follow the exact format of how it is written in the HTML document. In those cases, you can
use the preformatted tag (<pre>).
Any text between the opening <pre> tag and the closing
</pre> tag will preserve the formatting of the source document.
<pre>
function testFunction( strText ){
alert (strText)
}
</pre>
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This will produce following result:
function testFunction( strText ){
alert (strText)
}
|
Horizontal Rules - The <hr /> Element
Horizontal rules are used to visually break up sections of a
document. The <hr> tag creates a line from the current position in
the document to the right margin and breaks the line accordingly.
For example you may want to give a line between two paragraphs as follows:
<p>This is paragraph one and should be on top</p>
<hr />
<p>This is paragraph two and should be at bottom</p>
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This will produce following result:
This is paragraph one and should be on top
This is paragraph two and should be at bottom
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Again <hr /> tag is an example of an empty element, where you
do not need opening and closing tags, as there is nothing to go in
between them.
Note: The <hr /> element has a space between the
characters br and the forward slash. If you omit this space, older
browsers will have trouble rendering the line break, while if you miss
the forward slash character and just use <hr> it is not valid
XHTML
Presentational Tags:
If you use a word processor, you are familiar with the ability to
make text bold, italicized, or underlined; these are just three of the
ten options available to indicate how text can appear in HTML and XHTML.
Bold Text - The <b> Element:
Anything that appears in a <b>...</b> element is displayed in bold, like the word bold here:
<p>The following word uses a <b>bold</b> typeface.</p>
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This will produce following result:
The following word uses a bold typeface. |
Italic Text - The <i> Element:
Anything that appears in a <i>...</i> element is displayed in italicized, like the word italicized here:
<p>The following word uses a <i>italicized</i> typeface.</p>
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This will produce following result:
The following word uses a italicized typeface. |
Underlined Text - The <u> Element:
Anything that appears in a <u>...</u> element is displayed with underline, like the word underlined here:
<p>The following word uses a <u>underlined</u> typeface.</p>
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This will produce following result:
The following word uses a underlined typeface. |
Strike Text - The <strike> Element:
Anything that appears in a <strike>...</strike> element
is displayed with strikethrough, which is a thin line through
the text:
<p>The following word uses a <strike>strikethrough</strike> typeface.</p>
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This will produce following result:
The following word uses a strikethrough typeface. |
Monospaced font - The <tt> Element:
The content of a <tt> element is written in monospaced font.
Most fonts are known as variable-width fonts because different letters
are of different widths (for example, the letter m is wider than the
letter i). In a monospaced font, however, each letter is the same width.
<p>The following word uses a <tt>monospaced</tt> typeface.</p>
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This will produce following result:
The following word uses a monospaced typeface. |
Superscript Text - The <sup> Element:
The content of a <sup> element is written in superscript; the
font size used is the same size as the characters surrounding it but is
displayed half a character.s height above the other characters.
<p>The following word uses a <sup>superscript</sup> typeface.</p>
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This will produce following result:
The following word uses a superscript typeface. |
Subscript Text - The <sub> Element:
The content of a <sub> element is written in subscript; the
font size used is the same as the characters surrounding it, but is
displayed half a character.s height beneath the other characters.
<p>The following word uses a <sub>subscript</sub> typeface.</p>
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This will produce following result:
The following word uses a subscript typeface. |
Larger Text - The <big> Element:
The content of the <big> element is displayed one font size larger than the rest of the text surrounding it.
<p>The following word uses a <big>big</big> typeface.</p>
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This will produce following result:
The following word uses a big typeface. |
Smaller Text - The <small> Element:
The content of the <small> element is displayed one font size smaller than the rest of the text surrounding it.
<p>The following word uses a <small>small</small> typeface.</p>
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This will produce following result:
The following word uses a small typeface. |
Grouping - The <div> and <span> Elements :
The <div> and <span> elements allow you to group together
several elements to create sections or subsections of a page.
For example, you might want to put all of the footnotes on a page
within a <div> element to indicate that all of the elements within
that <div> element relate to the footnotes. You might then attach
a style to this <div> element so that they appear using a special
set of style rules.
The <div> element is used to group block-level elements together:
<div id="menu" align="middle" >
<a href="/index.htm">HOME</a> |
<a href="/about/contact_us.htm">CONTACT</a> |
<a href="/about/index.htm">ABOUT</a>
</div>
<div id="content" align="left" bgcolor="white">
<h5>Content Articles</h5>
<p>Actual content goes here.....</p>
</div>
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This will produce following result:
Content Articles
Actual content goes here.....
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The <span> element, on the other hand, can be used to group inline elements only. So, if you had a part
of a sentence or paragraph you wanted to group together you could use the <span> element.
<div><p>This is the example of <span
style="color:green">span tag</span> and the <span
style="color:purple">div tag</span> alongwith
CSS</p></div>
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This will produce following result:
This is the example of span tag and the div tag alongwith CSS
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These tags are commonly used with CSS to allow you to attach a style to a section of a page.