HTML - Additional Formatting

To promote good usability, experts recommend that you divide up your content to make it easier for users to find what they want on your Web page. There are two really easy ways to do this, I recommend using both. The first way is to use headings. There are six heading tags, each one more important than the next. The tags are as follows:

<h1></h1> <h2></h2> <h3></h3> <h4></h4> <h5></h5> <h6></h6>

I generally only use headings 1-3, but here's approximately how they all display:

H1 H2 H3 H4 H5 H6

Headings act a little bit like paragraphs, they always leave space above and below. Therefore, you can't place text next to the heading, only under it. You can, however, use the align attribute to move it to the center or to the right side.

A second way to divide up content is to use a blockquote. You can even blockquote a blockquote. The <blockquote></blockquote> tag set can indent content. (Usually paragraphs.)

<p>This is not indented.</p>

<blockquote>
<p>This is an indented paragraph. Isn't it cool? I think it is, I use blockquotes all the time. They're just plain fun! Writing HTML is fun too! Don't you think so?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>This is not indented.</p>

This would display as:

This is not indented. This is an indented paragraph. Isn't it cool? I think it is, I use blockquotes all the time. They're just plain fun! Writing HTML is fun too! Don't you think so? This is not indented.

Try out headings and blockquotes for yourself!

Practice

There are other formatting techniques that I didn't cover. For instance: text color, text size, font-family, background color and patterns. Many of these tasks could be accomplished with the <font></font> tags, but the current HTML guidelines do not include the font tags. They have been eliminated and, in the future, so will all the formatting techniques you have learned thus far. This is being done so that designers like you and I, can focus more of our attention on coding a well-structured document.

Don't fret though, all formatting techniques can be accomplished through style sheets, which are available right now. The only problem is that old browsers (like Netscape 4.x and IE 5) don't fully support style sheets. They can still handle basic style sheets that do text coloring and sizes, but not the advanced or even semi-advanced techniques. While on the other hand, the new generation of browsers (like Netscape 6 and IE 5.5) do support most features of style sheets. It's just a matter of waiting until most of the users upgrade to newer browsers. Since basic style sheets work in browsers right now, I chose not to teach you old tags that will not be supported in the near future. You can learn basic style techniques that work in all the current browsers in our Style Sheet Tutorial.

Let's get back to HTML with Lists/Bullets.

Introduction | Basic Formatting | Images | Linking
Additional Formatting | Lists/Bullets | Basic Tables
Advanced Tables | Forms | HTML Cheat Sheet