Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS- P2: This book walks readers through the process of creating a basic Web site from scratch using HMTL, the basis for billions of Web pages, and then jazzing it up with advanced techniques from the author’s award-winning sites. This updated edition features new material that shows readers how to attract visitors to a site and keep them there, including new JavaScript examples and coverage of cascading style sheets and XHTML, technologies that make building successful Web sites even easier. | 24 Creating Cool Web Sites with HTM L XHTM L and CSS Develop the habit of closing any tag that you open. What do you think would happen if you included quotation marks around a tag suppose for example that you used html at the beginning of your document rather than html . If you guessed that only the quotes would be displayed you re right. Let me say it one more time Web browsers are very simple-minded in their interpretation of HTML. Any tags that vary from the specific characters in the HTML-language specification result in something other than what you were expecting or your formatting requests are ignored completely. Breaking at Paragraphs and Lines The most helpful markup tags and probably the tags that you ll use most often specify that you want a paragraph break or a line break. Several variants of these tags exist but you can create readable and useful Web documents by using only the tags p p and br . To specify that you want a paragraph break use the p tag. Many HTML tags are mnemonic p for paragraph. The following example adds some p tag pairs to the file shown in Figure 2-1 and also wraps the file in the html and html tags. Notice that the p tag is a container. The open tag appears before the passage to be affected and the close tag appears at the end of the passage html Dave s Desk Somewhere in Cyberspace p Dear Reader p p Thank you for connecting to my Web server but I regret to tell you that things aren t up and running yet They will be _soon_ but they aren t today. p p Sincerely p p Dave Taylor p html Figure 2-2 shows what this HTML text looks like in a browser. Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on to remove this watermark. Chapter 2 Building Your First Web Page HTML Basics Figure 2-2 Paragraph breaks in . The version of the file in Figure 2-2 is a huge improvement over Figure 2-1 but some problems still exist not the least of which is that the first few lines don t look right. In their zeal to organize the text
