246996016-HTML5-Step-by-Step

26 Chapter 3
This chapter introduces several important tags that format text according to its purpose.
In Chapter 2, “Setting Up the Document Structure,” you learned about the tag for
regular paragraphs, but there are many other tags that are used for headings, programming
code, quotations, and more. Most of the tags discussed in this chapter are semantic
tags; they describe the function of the text, rather than provide directions for formatting.
For example, the heading tag specifies that the text within it should be formatted
as a major heading, but it provides no specifics as to what that formatting should be.
The formatting specifics for semantic tags can come from a variety of sources:
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Styles As you will learn in Part 2 of this book, you can specify the font families
and sizes to use throughout your entire Web site. For example, you can select a font
family that will be suggested to the browser whenever a certain tag is applied.
The Web browser in use Each Web browser has defaults for the standard HTML
tags. For example, in Internet Explorer (and most other browsers), is leftaligned,
18-point Times New Roman. Most browsers use the same defaults for the
very basic tags, but non-standard browsers, such as those on phones, often display
text differently.
Individual user customization A user can customize his Web browser to suit his
preferences. Later in this chapter, you’ll get to play with these settings in Internet
Explorer so you’ll know what your potential audience might be doing.
Keep in mind as you practice using tags that their formatting is not fixed. The results you
see when previewing the exercise pages in Internet Explorer represent the default settings
for your version of Internet Explorer (or whatever browser you are using to preview
them); the style is not intrinsic to those tags themselves. That will become important in
Part 2 of the book, when you learn how to define more specific formatting for tags.
See Also Do you need only a quick refresher on the topics in this chapter? See the Key Points
section at the end of this chapter.
Practice Files Before you can use the practice files provided for this chapter, you need
to download and install them from the book’s companion content location. See “Using
the Practice Files” at the beginning of this book for more information.
Creating Headings
Headings in Web pages function the same way as they do in printed documents—they
separate text into sections. The HTML standard defines six levels of headings,
through , each one progressively smaller in font size.