HTML - An Introduction

Before you can fully appreciate the power of the language and begin creating effective HTML documents, you must yield to its one fundamental rule: HTML is designed to structure documents and make their content more accessible, not to format documents for display purposes.

HTML does provide many different ways to let you define the appearance of your documents, font specifications, line breaks, and multicolumn text are all features of the language. And, of course, appearance is important, since it can have either detrimental or beneficial effects on how users access and use the information in your HTML documents

But with HTML, content is paramount; appearance is secondary, particularly since it is less predictable, given the variety of browser graphics and text-formatting capabilities. Besides, HTML contains many more ways for structuring your document content without regard to the final appearance i.e. section headers, structured lists, paragraphs, rules, titles, and embedded images are all defined without regard for how these elements might be rendered by a browser.

If you treat HTML as a document-generation tool, you will be sorely disappointed in your ability to format your document in a specific way. There is simply not enough capability built into HTML to allow you to create the kind of documents you might want to create. In short, don't waste your time trying to force HTML to do things it was never designed to do.

Instead, use HTML in the manner for which it was designed i.e. indicating the structure of a document so that the browser can then render appropriate HTML content. Create your documents using these tags and you'll be happier, your documents will look better, and your readers will benefit immensely.