Astro Lesson #4 : the.bold.and.the.beautiful!

As promised, we are now going to show you how to manipulate your text a little more - believe us, it sounds more fun than it actually is - but necessary all the same. Last lesson we talked about font size - some people also like to use the heading tags to create the effect of various sized text for the purpose of - you guessed it! - headings. This is important if, later on, you wish to enter into the spooky land of cascading style sheets. The heading tag looks like this ..

<h1>

My meaningful heading

</h1>

This can be specified with a value from 1 to 6 for different sizes, such as h2, h3, h4. Ho Hum!

Are you still here? Sometimes we need to emphasize a word or two, as we just did to get your attention. We can do this using the Bold and Italic tags

<b>
Look at that!
</b>

<i>
Look at this!
</i>


Or, for extra effect - use both ...

<i><b>
Look at this and that!
</b> </i>


It's much more sophisticated to use <cite> instead of <i>, and <em>
instead of <b> - they perform the same function, but there is the argument that software programs for the vision-impaired that read tags as speech can interpret your meaning more clearly this way - for instance 'cite' will be read as though the sentence is a quote. Nevertheless, bold and italic are the more common methods.

Would you like that in the middle Madam? Certainly! Text and images often need to be placed smack dab in the centre of the page and, call me crazy, but you can do that with the Center tag. (Exciting, isn't it? And, yes please use the americana spelling)

<center>

Wheee - Look at me!
</center>

The popularity of the center tag is waning, sadly, in favour of the much more useful <div> tag. This little usurper is actually pretty handy when it comes to Style Sheets (later!) and like the center tag, affects whatever comes after it. Try to use it rather than <center>, and remember that you can also specify align="left" or align="right". Left is the default.

<div align="center">

Aren't I just the best tag you ever did see?

</div>

Break it up, break it up! Long lines of words may look very pretty but for the reader it can be boring, boring, boring... it is handy, therefore, to learn how to create gaps and segments, in your blocks of text in order to rest the eyes of the general public

Meet some new friends that will help you achieve this in life - Mr Paragraph, Miss Blockquote and Master Break. (Later they will introduce us to the rest of the family...)

Break

Insert a line break. These are handy little suckers and you can use lots of them if you are trying to move text or objects further apart.

Here's one<br>
Here's two<br><br>

See the difference?

Paragraph

Start a new paragraph. That's what it does.

<p>

Use it like this and stap me nurglers! Will you look at that!

 

</p>

Blockquote

This is one of our favourite tags - originally meant for long quotes, it is more commonly used in order to indent text, and you can put in a few at once which will indent it a little more each time. This tag needs a closer though, so make sure you don't leave one 'hanging around'. Otherwise things may start looking a bit askew.

<blockquote> <blockquote>

Quit shoving already!

</blockquote> </blockquote>

Now, go and play with these new friends. Until next time when we will talk about ordinary lists and definition lists, and maybe (gasp!) Hyperlinks! Astro Lesson #4 now comes to a timely end.

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copyright.wendy.phillips.1998