HTML Tags

This is going to be a high-speed HTML Tags tutorial so buckle up your seat-belt. Don't worry yet about creating web page documents. We'll get to that in a few minutes. Right now we're just going to cover some HTML Tags so that you get comfortable with marking up text with HTML and get comfortable with the tags themselves.

First HTML Tags - Basic formatting tags: <b> <u> <i>

As you may remember, you can apply basic formatting such as bold, italic and underline to HTML text by simply wrapping parts of your text in the HTML Tags <b>, <i>, and <u>.

Try these tags right now in HTML-Help-Toy. Just type in some text then add the tags around word using the "open tag/close tag" form as we'd discussed earlier (see screen-shot example).

Now wasn't that pretty easy? Let's do more!

Forced line breaks and HTML whitespace <br>

While you were playing around with the basic formatting tags, you might have noticed something very strange about HTML -- it ignores repeated whitespace. By whitespace I mean the spaces you get in text by hitting the space bar multiple times or hitting the Enter key (line break). In fact, HTML compresses all spaces and line-breaks into just a single space. This seems weird at first but it makes sense after you learn how to work with it.

So let's do that: the first thing you'll need to understand is how to add line breaks. It's just to messy to have all lines packed together all the time. The way you force a line break is with the <br> tag. Unlike the other tags you have learned, this one stands on its own (it doesn't need a closing </br> tag).

To remember this, observe the following example, try it yourself and memorize the poem. ;)

Great, now let's move on to some more advanced ideas in HTML, namely organizing text into blocks for presentation...