Text and Lists

In This Chapter

* Working with basic blocks of text

* Manipulating text blocks

* Creating bulleted, numbered, and definition lists

HTML documents consist of text, images, multimedia files, links, and other pieces of content that you bring together into one page by using markup elements and attributes. You use blocks of text to create such document elements as headings, paragraphs, and lists. The first step in creating a solid HTML document is laying a firm foundation that establishes the document's structure.

Formatting Text

Here's a super-ultra-technical definition of a block of text: some chunk of content that wraps from one line to another inside an HTML element.

Your HTML page is a giant collection of blocks of text:

  Every bit of content on your Web page must be part of some block element.

  Every block element sits within theelement on your page.

HTML recognizes several kinds of text blocks that you can use in your document, including (but not limited to)

  Paragraphs

  Headings

  Block quotes

  Lists

  Tables

  Forms

Paragraphs

Paragraphs are used more often in Web pages than any other kind of text block.

REMEMBER

HTML browsers don't recognize the hard returns that you enter when you create your page inside an editor. You must use a

element to tell the browser to separate the contained block of text as a paragraph.

Formatting

To create a paragraph, follow these steps:

1. Add

in the body of the document.

2. Type the content of the paragraph.

3. Add

to close that paragraph.

Here's what it looks like:

This is a paragraph. It's a very simple structure that you will use time and again in your Web pages.

This is another paragraph. What could be simpler to create?

Excerpted from HTML 4 For Dummies by Ed Tittel Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.