Chapter 21. Formatting Text

It's easy ”too easy, in fact ”to begin thinking that a Web page is made up of three basic parts : text, images, and links. Although that's generally true, it tends to imply that text is for content, images are for show, and links are for action.

The facts are a little muddier than that. Text is first and foremost a vehicle for information, but when text is dressed up in a fancy font or cool color , it contributes both content and design ”feeding two brain hemispheres for the price of one. Similarly, organizing text into a bulleted or numbered list affects both content and style.

This chapter assumes that you have already installed Netscape Communicator 4.7 and its built-in Web-authoring program, Composer. If you have not, visit http://wp.netscape.com/download/archive.html and download Netscape Communicator version 4.7 for your system. (It's free.)

More recent versions of Netscape and Composer are available, as well. Although the exact steps for some features may differ slightly, you'll have little difficulty finding your way around a newer version of Composer using the material in this book.