HTML Ignores (most) blanks
One of the most important thing to understand about any language is its punctuation.
Though blank space is not generally what we think of when we consider the concept of punctuation, it is generally well understood by humans reading english that a blank line
(or sometimes two) signifies the end of a paragraph (or sometimes the end of a page only!) and a single space between words signifies the end of a word, with two spaces usually seen as being a typo.
well, computers often treat spaces quite differently and this is one of the first things to understand about HTML syntax. In HTML *almost every* blank character is a candidate for being ignored!
To illustrate this, create a txt file on your computer with the following content:
h
i
worl
d
wide web
!!!
!
-----------
(end of content to put in text file)
now: try viewing this in your browser -- the easiest
way to do this is to use the file menu, available on most browsers.
Sometimes you also have to choose "open file", or a similar command.
you can also see what the output would look like by using the text area
below and the display button:
more about text files click here
more about computer files, click here
Copyright 2004, Daniel Heller