Exit tutorial


HTML Tutorial
Web Design Stage 1: Further Text Tags
More Tags To Try Out

There are a few more tags you might like to try while you are creating your pages. The tags I will be talking about in this section are <SUB>, <SUP>, <PRE>, and the Netscape only <BLINK> tag.

<SUB> and <SUP>

These tags are used to place a number or words slightly above or below your normal text. The <SUB> tag works like this:

Area<SUB>1</SUB>

The result is this:

Area1

And the <SUP> tag allows you to use exponents if you need to:

X<SUP>2</SUP> + Y<SUP>2</SUP> = 0

And this gives you:

X2 + Y2 = 0

These two tags are most useful if you are writing mathematical equations and such on your page, but there are other times you may wish to use them.

The <PRE> Tag

The <PRE> tag is used when you want to keep the same amount of whitespace on your web page as you have in your html code in your text editor. This is useful when you have to post programming code or mathematical equations. Here is an example:

<PRE>
x=1;
y=2;
if (x==1)
  y=2;
</PRE>

And this somewhat redundant code gives you this: 


x=1; 
y=2; 
if (x==1) 
  y=2;

Notice how we didn't need to use <BR> or &nbsp; inside the <PRE> tags. This can save you some headaches from writing in line breaks and spaces manually so often.

The <BLINK> Tag

Yes, this is the tag everyone has been complaining about. If you are using Netscape you can see the following reason why viewers get annoyed by this tag:

LOOK AT ME NOW!!!!!!

If you have IE, you won't see the text blink, but you can get the general idea. Actually, if the tag is used in a better way, it can help point out important things you want people to see. Here is an example:

This rule is <BLINK>very</BLINK> important!

This gives you the following:

This rule is very important!

Just use your own discretion when placing blinking text on your page, and remember it will only blink if your viewer is using Netscape.

The <MARQUEE> Tag

There is a similar type of tag which works only in Internet Explorer - The Marquee Tag. This will scroll text across the screen like so

<marquee>You should see this text scrolling across the screen</marquee>

You should see this text scrolling across the screen

Both of the last two examples are called Deprecated Tags. This means that although they are supported currently, and for the forseeable future, there will come a time when they will no longer be considered part of the HTML standard and will become obsolete. With the advent of XHTML - Extensible HTML, the successor to HTML - more and more tags will become deprecated.

[Back to the Stage 1 Index]