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| Helpful Hints | October 9, 2001 |
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Give Me Some Space! Most professional web designers will agree that one of the most common design flaws is the crowded appearance of text in the browser window when the text is left to its own devices. Giving your text a bit of white space on the margins will make it more aesthetic and easier to read. There are several ways to accomplish this and I'll tell you two of them in this article. Using the Blockquote tag. If you place the HTML tag <blockquote> in a document, it will shift everything which follows a little to the right of the left edge of the browser and a little to the left of the right edge of the browser. In word processing, this is known as a "double indent." To return to normal, the </blockquote> is used. For example, without the blockquote tags, this sentence appears on the left edge like this. Using the blockquote tag moves the text a little to the right as in this sentence. This method works well if you have no other alignment consideration. If you intend to wrap text around a graphic, or are planning to use left and or right alignment for different blocks of text and or graphics, then I'd recommend using the other method I'm about to describe. Using the table tag. If you set up a table at the very beginning of your document, you can specify either an exact width (expressed in pixels) or a percentage. I recommend using a 95% width because this allows a narrow margin on each side which remains constant regardless of the resolution your visitors use. The tag which you place at the beginning of your document, after the <body> tag would look like this: <table width="95%" align="center"><tr><td>
If you use the table tag, be sure to turn off your table by placing the following tags at the end of your document, before the </body> tag . . . </td></tr></table> | ||
