Intro & Getting Started | Viewing Source & Tags | Making & Testing a Page | Basic Text Formatting | Images
Links | Directory Structure & e-mail | Tables | META Tags | Outside Resources

Basic Text Formatting:
You may have noticed that in whatever text you typed, if you hit "enter" to make a new paragraph, it didn't show up once you viewed the page. That's normal! Since HTML is really just text, and there's no character to represent a line break, you have to code a line break yourself.

<BR> - Think of it as "BReak line." The text will go down to the next available line.
<P> - Think of it as "Paragraph." The text will go down to the next line, and then one more, to create a clear break between two paragraphs.
NOTE: The above tags are special. They have no closing tags.

You may also want to format your text:
<B> </B> - Bold
<I> </I> - Italicize
<U> </U> - Underline

These are pretty self-explanatory text formatting options. You should be familiar with them if you've used any kind of word processing program. Simply surround the text you wish to format (for example, "This word is <B>bold</B>"). You can even use more than one, if you wish. Remember to close all tags, and try and keep them in order as you use them (for example, "<B><I>bold and italic</I></B>")- first opened, last closed.

You'll probably also want to format the size and font of your text at some point. The <FONT> tag allows you to do this. For example, if you wanted the font for your text to be a size 12 Arial, the syntax of your coding would look something like this:

<FONT SIZE="12" FACE="Arial">insert all of your text here</FONT>

The "FONT" indicates to the browser that you're formatting the text. The "SIZE" lets the browser know what size to place the text at (the sizes are the same as they would be if you were working in a word processor). Finally, the "FACE" lets the browser know which exact font to write in. "SIZE" and "FACE," in this case, are examples of tag "attributes." Most tags have attributes that let you specify even more how the tag should affect your content. To use an attribute, include it in the opening tag, add an =, and put the specific info in quotation marks.

You'll notice that all of your text will be left-justified. To center anything on your page, simply surround it with the <CENTER> and </CENTER> tags.

However, if you're going to be aligning text alone (rather than images, etc.), it is better programming to use the ALIGN attribute of the <P> tag. You'll remember the <P> tag from earlier, when creating a new paragraph. If you want to have a single paragraph be aligned to the right, it would look something like this:

<P ALIGN="Right">insert all of your text here</P>

You'll notice that now there is a closing tag ("</P>"). Since you are using the <P> in conjunction with new attributes, you must close the tag.

>> next