Web Design - Introduction to HTML: Formatting Text

Sections:  Introduction  |  Section 1  |  Section 2  |  Section 3  |  Section 4   |  Section 5
Section Two:  Part A  |  Part B  |  Part C  |  Part D  |  Part E  |  Part F  |  Part G

The Paragraph Tag

The Paragraph Tag

In a previous section, you were introduced to the <br> tag, which could be used to create new lines / line breaks. There is another set of tags (opening and closing) that creates a similar effect.

Suppose you are writing an article for an online newspaper. The article you are writing has multiple paragraphs and you would like a double space between each paragraph. You could use two <br> tags between each paragraph of text to create your desired effect or you could use the <p></p> tags.

The <p></p> tags create paragraphs in your web page. The paragraphs created are single-spaced, wrapped text with a double space between paragraphs .

spacing Double vs Single

Stop and Think?

You may be thinking…why should I place <p></p> tags around each paragraph when I can just use two <br> tags between each paragraph for the same effect? This is a good question. Below are two reasons why web designers / web authors use the <p></p> tag instead of the double <br> tag to create the desired effect:

  • Visitors to your site may use assistive technology to view web pages. The <p></p> tags denote paragraph text providing insight about the text to these viewers.
  • Using <p></p> tags allows you to do something you can’t do with <br> tags: adjust the alignment of text. We will learn about this shortly.

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