Basic HTML Formatting With the BR Tag

One of the most frustrating things to a new HTML publisher is adding line breaks. In a normal text document a line break is as simple as adding a new line, however, in HTML it involves a special code called the <br> tag.

Take for example the following document:

Hello
World

In a text document it would appear exactly as you would expect, but when viewed in a web browser it would appear as:

HelloWorld

Frustrating right? So instead we replace the line break with a tag called

Hello<br>
World

Now, instead of running into a single line, the <br> is viewed as a line break by web browsers!

As an interesting observation, <br> is one of the few HTML tags that doesn’t have a closing tag. Remember, we looked at the <strong> tag which required a closing </strong> tag? In HTML, there is no closing </br> tag because nothing can go between a <br> and a </br> after all, it’s a line break.

HTML isn’t complicated, it’s meant to be easy. Over the next two weeks, I’ll introduce you to ten key HTML tags which are used to build all the websites in the world. They are:

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