Lesson 6. Formatting Text with HTML and CSS

In Lessons 4, "Learning the Basics of HTML," and 5, "Adding Links to Your Web Pages," you learned the basics of HTML, including tags used to describe page structure and create links. With that background, you're now ready to learn more about what HTML and CSS can do in terms of text formatting and layout.

In this Lesson

Today you'll learn about most of the remaining tags in HTML that you'll need to know to construct pages, including tags in HTML 2.0 through HTML 4.01, as well as HTML attributes in individual browsers. Today you'll learn how to do the following:

• Specify the appearance of individual characters (bold, italic, underlined)

• Include special characters (characters with accents, copyright marks, and so on)

• Create preformatted text (text with spaces and tabs retained)

• Align text left, right, and centered

• Change the font and font size

• Create other miscellaneous HTML text elements, including line breaks, rule lines, addresses, and quotations

In addition, you'll learn the differences between standard HTML and HTML extensions, and when to choose which tags to use in your pages. You'll also learn which of these tags have been deprecated in XHTML, and how to use CSS to achieve the same effects. Finally, you'll create a complete web page that uses many of the tags presented today, as well as the information from the preceding four days.

Today you'll cover several tags and options, so you might find it a bit overwhelming. Don't worry about remembering everything now; just get a grasp of what sort of formatting you can do in HTML, and then you can look up the specific tags later.