H.T.T.P.: Paragraphs

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You probably have the basics of your page built by now, the "skeleton" and a heading or two. It is time to put some text on your page, text to explain the page, text to convey ideas. The next two sections will cover the business of putting text on your page. Do not dispair, it is not as complicated as it sounds, but there are many things to cover that can make your text look almost anyway. Because H.T.T.P. is designed to provide a "bottom- up" approach to building a webpage, this section will cover how to put a paragraph on your page (starting a paragraph, aligning the text the way you want, and more...). The next section will deal with what you do with your text once it's there (italicize, bold, etc...).

Beginning a Paragraph

 ... 

- This tells the web browser to begin a new paragraph. This means that it will include an empty line before it displays the new paragraph. Although the closing tag is not necessary it is often useful to you to be able to distinguish between paragraphs. The ALIGN option will let you align the text three different ways. ALIGN=left aligns the text along the left margin, while ALIGN=center centers all the text on the page and ALIGN=right aligns the text along the right margin. When using the ALIGN option it is highly recommended that you use the closing .

Examples:

Last line in last paragraph. First line in next paragraph.
Last line in last paragraph. `<P>` First line in next paragraph.	Last line in last paragraph. First line in next paragraph.

Using a Line Break

 

- This tag, commonly referred to as a line break, does exactly the same thing as pressing return in your text editor, it skips to the beginning of the next line. The line break is very useful is you want to end a line and begin a new one. It is also commonly used in place of the  tag; two   tags make an empty line, just like the  tag.

Examples:

No `<BR>` tags	... the end of a sentence. The beginning of ...
1 `<BR>` tag	... the end of a sentence. The beginning of...
2 `<BR>` tags	... the end of a sentence The beginning of ...

Centering

<CENTER> ... </CENTER>

- This tag does exactly the same thing that  does; it centers your text. However, it can also be used to center pictures and headings.

Examples:

Some text that is not centered.

Some text that is centered.

Indenting a Paragraph

<BLOCKQUOTE> ... </BLOCKQUOTE>

- This is the tag that you will want to use when you want to indent a paragraph, to set it off from the rest of the text. It is called a block quote and comes from the practice of indenting a section of quotation that is longer than a few lines.

Example:

"This is a section of blockquoted quote from
a famous poet, but we can't show the actual
quote because we don't know who he is or which
quote of his (or hers, for that matter) it is,
but we were hoping to make some kind of point.
We hope you got it. Thank you."

Separatine Paragraphs

<HR SIZE=xx WIDTH=xx or xxx%>

- This is another good way of separating your paragraphs. Known as a "Horizontal Rule," <HR> places a horizontal line on your page. The SIZE option specifies how big heightwise you want it to be. The WIDTH specifies how wide you want it to be, either in pixels or in a percentage of the screen.

Example:

<HR>

<HR SIZE=3 WIDTH=40>

<HR SIZE=5 WIDTH=40%>