In the first lesson, we learned of those commands that will cause the very space of your home-page to manifest itself. In this lesson we will begin to explore how you may control the contents themselves. Obviously the contents of a web-page are text and graphics-images. We will first examine the various commands for controlling the appearance of text on a home-page.

Now, if you are concerned with the actual structuring of the content of your writing, I personally recommend two fine books by a dear friend of mine by the name of Aristotle. They are his Poetics and Rhetoric, both of which can be found on the internet. Now, if you are concerned with the HTML commands for controlling the appearance of text, you are in the right place!

There may be times when you want the text to appear exactly as you have typed it. This may be to preserve the spacing or the font in the case of another program being used to generate text. In such a case, we use the following tag,

< PRE >

Which will cause the browser's defaults to be ignored, and your text to appear exactly as you have typed it. No special fonts or spacing will be used by the browser. If, at some point, you wish for the browser to use default fonts again (such as you see here) , then you need only insert the following tag:

</PRE>

At which point the defaults will be used again.

Then, we turn our attention to the overall form in which the text will be displayed, begin with "headers". Your browser recognizes six header-sizes, and the commands and results of those commands look like this:

<h1>Header One</h1>

<h2>Header Two</h2>

<h3>Header Three</h3>

<h4>Header Four</h4>

<h5>Header Five</h5>

<h6>Header Six</h6>

You must always remember to use the negative command </> to inform the system that the header should now be turned off, or else all your text could end up looking like this.

One technique used by many HTML writers, who sometimes wish to give their text a neat appearance by separating paragraphs, is the use of a horizontal line. The command for causing such a line to appear is <hr>, and the line will appear like this:

The horizontal divider is a useful method for separating sections of text and organizing them. Always remember that even the most trivial text can be made a pleasing thing by the use of such organizational tools. One such tool is the "bullet list", which appears as follows:

• One Thing
• Two Things
• Three Things

The commands for creating such a list are to be written as follows:

<ul> <li>One Thing <li>Two Things <li>Three Things </ul>

The most popular device is the centered heading. Made manifest by the tag <center> and brought to a close by the tag </center>, this command causes text to have this appearance:

One technique that falls within the domain of text-aesthetics more than organization is blinking text. The tags for this command are <blink> </blink>.

Something needs be said concerning various changes in the appearance of text itself. For these purposes, two important commands cause text to appear in boldface and in italics. These commands are very simple. To cause your text to appear in bold print, you need only frame the text in question in these tags

< b > < /b >

< i > < /i >

< br >