View the page source for this page. This first piece of text has no tags at all. (Strictly, this is not allowed in XHTML.) You may have noticed by now that the way the HTML is laid out in the source, with spaces and line breaks, does not affect the way it displays. In the source, there are two blank lines before this one but that doesn't show up in the browser window. Neither do these big spaces.

P tags enclose a paragraph. You put a P tag just before the beginning of the paragraph and a /P tag just after the end - this is essential to comply with XHTML standards. Where the lines are broken in the source has no relationship to where the lines are broken when displayed by your browser. If you want to
start a new line, well, this is how you do it.
Start another if it's right for your web page. Notice that there is no extra vertical space inserted.




By putting together a number of the BR tags (anyhow), you can get a vertical space, like the one just above here, if you really want one.

Because BR tags come singly, not in pairs, XHTML requires that they are closed off inside themselves with a / before the ending >

It makes no sense to put P tags one after the other. But one can put P /P pairs together, which makes empty paragraphs.

These five empty paragraphs below have nothing in them at all, so they might be ignored.

Whereas these five paragraphs below each have a blank space, so they will be given space just as if they were proper paragraphs.

 

 

 

 

 

And this paragraph comes after the blank space.

When you want a more noticeable break in the text, try an HR tag. (Stands for Horizontal Rule.) Or use how ever many you want, one after the other. How you format them in the source doesn't matter.

That's basically it for this page, but let us point out one more thing. The P tag has in the past been used as a paragraph break. The correct way to do it is always to use a /P at the end of the paragraph.

(Starting with a P again) This actually makes a difference to how much space there is left before an HR. In contrast, look at the next HR which does not have /P or P round it.

There we see it!