<h1>, is the largest header size,
<h2> is smaller, etc.
You'll also notice that the above title is centered. There are
essentially three ways to center things. Header tags can take
the align=center attribute like I have
done with the title above. In that case the centering terminates
with the end header tag. You can center a paragraph via
<p align=center>, and the centering will terminate
at either a </p> or the next <p>
tag that it encounters. Finally, the last way to do it is with
the <div> tags. These division tags will also
take the align=center attribute. They signal
the begining of a division in your HTML, and the centering will
be terminated when the </div> tag is encountered.
Making text bold and italicized are also popular, and you can also interject
pre-formatted text. In general, web browsers will put preformatted text in a different font, as you saw above, but the real advantage is that when you use the
<pre> tags, the spaces are
preserved, like so:
This is text
that is formatted
with the <pre> tags, notice that
the spacing and carriage returns
are preserved until
the <pre> end tag is encountered.
Another tool is the use of the <font>
tag. This tag can be used to change the color
of your text, the size of your text and even
the font face of your text. However, you
must be careful in your use of the <font> tag.
Not all browsers may know what the arial font is (for example), and
similarly, people may not be using color screens if you try and get
fancy with color. In order to make your pages as universally
readable as possible, try to avoid using the
<font> tag unless you really need (or want)
to do so.
The other thing that you may have noticed is that I have managed to get the left and right wakas (less than and greater than symbols) to appear in the text of my web page. Remember that when you normally try and use the wakas, web browsers will interpret whatever comes after the left waka (<) as an HTML tag, until the browser finds a right waka (>). The wakas and other special characters can be displayed via the use of the what are called character escapes.
The escape character that HTML uses is the ampersand (&). Note
that if you just type the ampersand by itself, like so: & , web
browsers will interpret it as text and will write an ampersand
to the screen. However, if the ampersand is followed by some
text which is followed by a semicolon, then the browser
interprets it as an escape character and prints to the screen
whatever the text after the ampersand and before the semicolon
indicates. For example, to get a browser to print the left
waka to the screen instead of interpreting it as the beginning
of an HTML tag, you should put the following text in your HTML
document: < and it will give you < .
You can find all of the ampersand escapes at the W3C website.