HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
series of newline or return characters in a text processor-displayed doc-
ument, created when the author hits the Enter key repeatedly, creates
an empty paragraph for each one, browsers typically ignore all but the
first paragraph tag, as well as newline characters.
In practice, with HTML you can ignore the starting
<p>
tag at the begin-
ning of the first paragraph and the
</p>
tags at the end of each para-
graph: they can be implied from other tags that occur in the document
[*]
XHTML, on the other hand, requires explicit starting and ending tags.
<body>
This is the first paragraph, at the very beginning of the body of
this document.
<p>
The tag above signals the start of this second paragraph. When rendered
by a browser, it will begin slightly below the end of the first paragraph,
with a bit of extra whitespace between the two paragraphs.
<p>
This is the last paragraph in the example.
</body>
Notice that we haven't included the paragraph start tag (
<p>
) for the
first paragraph or any end paragraph tags; they can be unambiguously
inferred by the HTML browser and are therefore unnecessary.
