Using HTML Tags

The appearance of documents in Netscape (and this applies to other browsers as well) is controlled by the use of markup tags, which are contained within < and >. We've already encountered the tag, which tells the browser to skip a space (or, more precisely, to separate two paragraphs).

Some tags are single: one is enough to accomplish its purpose. Others surround text that is intended to have specific properties or appearance, in effect turning the action of the tag on and off.

...in effect turning the action of the tag on and off...

is an example of the markup for bolding the words 'on' and 'off'.

Lists are a frequent form of text markup, and they come in several forms:

you can have ordered lists (HTML will number the items in a list that begins with a <ol> tag, has each member labelled with a <li> tag, and ends with a </ol> tag.
unordered lists (with bullets in place of numbers) start with a <ul> tag, has each member labelled with a <li> tag, and ends with a </ul> tag.

Otmar Lendl's List is a convenient summary of common tags, though it doesn't cover the fancier possibilities that are beginning to appear on pages designed with Netscape 1.1's extensions of the HTML 1.0 standard.

For example, Netscape 1.1 permits the use of tables. Here's an example of presentation of a tabular presentation of the occurrences of the word pshaw in the Oxford English Dictionary, sorted by the date of the source quoted. You might want to look at the source code for that document to get an idea of the complexity of the markup (which incidentally wasn't all that difficult to produce, using search-and-replace functions of Microsoft Word to add the tags).