HTML, XHTML & CSS

Figure 5-1: Web browsers delineate paragraphs
with line breaks.
Chapter 5: Text and Lists
Sloppy HTML coders don’t use the closing tag when they create paragraphs.
Although some browsers permit this dubious practice without yelling,
omitting the closing tag isn’t good practice because it:
✓ Isn’t correct syntax
✓ Causes problems with style sheets
✓ Can cause a page to appear inconsistently from one browser to another
You can control paragraph formatting (color, style, size, and alignment) with
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), covered in Chapters 9–12.
Headings
Headings break a document into sections. This book uses headings and subheadings
to divide each chapter into sections, and you can do the same with
your Web page. Headings
✓ Create an organizational structure
✓ Break up the text flow on the page
✓ Provide visual cues as to how pieces of content are grouped
HTML includes six elements for different heading levels in documents:
✓ is the most prominent heading (Heading 1)
✓ is the least prominent heading (Heading 6)
Follow numerical order from lowest to highest as you use HTML heading
levels. That is, don’t use a second-level heading until you use a first-level
heading, don’t use a third-level heading until you use a second, and so on. If
you want to change how headings look, Chapters 10 and 11 show you how to
use style sheets for that purpose.
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