HermitWare - Software, Ebooks and Screensavers

Should you, for any reason, wish to display text with a line through it, crossing it out, here's how:

The <s> tag stands for “strikethrough”.

SUBSCRIPT AND SUPERSCRIPT

HTML allows you to use superscript and subscript characters, using the <sup> and <sub> tags. Superscript refers to smaller characters displayed slightly above the line of text. Subscript means characters displayed slightly beneath the line of text.

PREFORMATTED TEXT

There are times when you want to publish a plain (ASCII) text passage on the web. This can be done using the <pre> tags. Most browsers will display the text using a non-proportionally-spaced font.

<pre>This is a plain text passage and it works very well thank you.</pre>

will display as

This is a plain text passage and it works very well thank you.

Using <pre> allows you to do the things with text that you can do in an ASCII text editor such as Notepad. For example, you can put a number of spaces together (not normally possible in HTML), and use tabs to indent lines.

This is a plain text passage using <pre>.
Here   I   am   using   more   than   one   space
between   words.
	This line was tabbed in
	as was this one.
This ends this example.

PHRASE ELEMENTS

There are a large group of tags which the HTML 4.0 recommendation calls a phrase element. These mark sections of text as being of a certain type. This information may be used by search engines for purposes of analysing your web pages. Web browsers may display these sections of text differently to normal text, though some may not. The purpose of the tags is not primarily to specify how the text should be displayed, but to give information to spiders and parsers on the nature of page's textual content. We will look at just a couple of such elements.

Citations

No doubt you use citations all the time. There is a HTML tag, <cite>, which marks a passage as being a citation or reference. Search engines may use this information for purposes such as assembling a bibliography of a document. Web browsers may display the marked passage differently to normal text, though some may not; in Internet Explorer it has the effect of displaying the text in italics. It would be bad practice to use this tag solely for the purpose of displaying text in italics.

Again, Internet Explorer displays text contained within <dfn> tags in italics.

Other Phrase Elements include:

CODE:	Designates a fragment of computer code.
SAMP:	Designates sample output from programs, scripts, etc.
KBD:	Indicates text to be entered by the user.
VAR:	Indicates an instance of a variable or program argument.
ABBR:	Indicates an abbreviated form (e.g., WWW, HTTP, URI, Mass., etc.).
ACRONYM:	Indicates an acronym (e.g., WAC, radar, etc.).

In our next issue we will continue this tutorial on displaying text and using fonts in your HTML web pages, looking at using styles and cascading style sheets to get more control over text appearance.


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