Text blocks

Except in one special circumstance, a browser will not obey any line breaks in the ASCII text file that contains the HTML document, but it will instead reformat the text to break at the right-hand margin of the window (or sub-region of the window) into which it is being displayed. This makes sense because fonts differ in respect of the widths of each character, and because the viewable area is determined by the size of the user's monitor and the size of the area assigned by the user to the browser window. Yet it is usually not desirable for an entire document to be reformatted into a single large text block. HTML therefore includes tags that break up the text into meaningful blocks. The most essential of these is the P (paragraph) element, which defines a single paragraph in the text. The browser begins a new paragraph on a new line and creates gaps between paragraphs:

					<P>This is a paragraph.</P>
					<P>This is another paragraph.</P>
				

With the advent of CSS and some of the common attributes described later, it is possible to use this one tag for almost all block-level formatting, though a number of other tags were defined in early versions of HTML and are still widely used for identifying headings, lists and other block-like structures.