HTML Essential Training

Formatting page content

In this series of exercises, we'll explore how to use HTML elements to format basic page content.

Adding headings

Headings help define the structure of the page and control the hierarchy of the content. You can use heading values ranging from a top-level heading of h1 all the way down to an h6. While there are several competing theories on the exact strategy to use when choosing headings, what really matters is that you are using them in an intelligent manner, to accurately reflect the importance of your content. It's also important to be consistent in how you use headings across your site, so deciding on when and how to use headings is an important part of planning your site.

Using paragraphs

The paragraph tag (⟨p⟩) is one of the most basic formatting tags, and one that you'll use often. It indicates a paragraph of text, and should be used for each individual paragraph.

Line breaks

Occasionally you'll need to perform a "soft return," that is, create a new line without using a new paragraph. To do that in HTML, you use the line break tag (⟨br⟩). Line break tags are inline, meaning you can use them within headers and paragraphs, and don't require a closing tag.

Let's say you were formatting an address, for example. You could use line breaks to make sure each line of the address appeared on a separate line, but still remained within the same paragraph.

lynda.com 6410 Via Real Carpinteria, CA 93103.