HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Here you are at the close of this lesson (a long one!) and facing yet another workshop.
This lesson covered a lot of ground, so I'll try to keep the questions easy. There are a
couple exercises that focus on building some additional pages for your website. Ready?
Q&A
Q If line breaks appear in HTML, can I also do page breaks?
A
HTML doesn't have a page break tag. Consider what the term
page
means in a
web document. If each document on the web is a single page, the only way to pro-
duce a page break is to split your HTML document into separate files and link
them.
Even within a single document, browsers have no concept of a page; each HTML
document simply scrolls by continuously. If you consider a single screen a page,
you still can't have what results in a page break in HTML. The screen size in each
browser is different. It's based on not only the browser itself, but also the size of
the monitor on which it runs, the number of lines defined, the font currently being
used, and other factors that you cannot control from HTML.
When you design your web pages, don't get too hung up on the concept of a page
the way it exists in paper documents. Remember, HTML's strength is its flexibility
for multiple kinds of systems and formats. Instead, think in terms of creating small
chunks of information and how they link together to form a complete presentation.
If page breaks are essential to your document, you might consider saving it in the
PDF format and making it available for download.
Q How can I include em dashes or curly quotes (typesetter's quotes) in my
HTML files?
A
There are entities for all these characters, but they might not be supported by all
browsers or on all platforms. Most people still don't use them. To add an em dash,
use
—
. The curly quote entities are
“
for the left quote and
”
for the right quote. Similarly, you can create curly single quotes using
&lsquo
; and
’
.
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