Wrapping Up HTML: Essential Elements and Techniques Before Moving to CSS

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Wrapping Up HTML: Essential Elements and Techniques Before Moving to CSS

As web developers complete their HTML journey and prepare to transition to CSS, it’s important to understand some of the miscellaneous yet crucial HTML elements and techniques that often get overlooked. These final HTML concepts provide essential functionality for creating properly formatted and accessible web content.

Using HTML Entities

HTML entities allow you to display special characters that might otherwise be interpreted as HTML code. For example, to display the less-than symbol (<) in text without it being interpreted as the beginning of a tag, you need to use the entity &lt;

Here are some common HTML entities:

  • Less than: &lt; displays as <
  • Greater than: &gt; displays as >
  • Copyright symbol: &copy; displays as ©
  • Non-breaking space: &nbsp; creates a space that won’t break into a new line

The Pre Tag

The <pre> tag is particularly useful when you want to display text exactly as it’s formatted in your HTML file. While normal HTML ignores extra spaces and line breaks, content within the pre tag maintains all spacing and line breaks as they appear in the code.

This makes it especially valuable for displaying code snippets or text that requires precise formatting.

Quotation Elements

HTML provides specific elements for marking up quotations:

  • The <q> tag is used for inline quotations
  • The <blockquote> element is for longer, block-level quotations
  • Both can be paired with the <cite> attribute to reference the source of the quotation

These semantic elements help search engines understand your content better and provide proper attribution for quoted material.

Deprecated Tags

Some HTML tags are now considered deprecated, meaning they’re no longer recommended for use in modern web development:

  • The <font> tag for styling text (use CSS instead)
  • The <center> tag for centering content (use CSS flexbox or other alignment properties)

While these tags may still work in browsers, they should be avoided in favor of CSS-based styling approaches.

Code Display

For displaying code on your webpage, the <code> tag is essential. This semantic element indicates that its content is computer code. For better presentation of code blocks, libraries like Prism.js can be used to add syntax highlighting and improve readability.

Canvas Element

The HTML <canvas> element provides a drawing space for JavaScript to create graphics, animations, and other visual elements. While the element itself is simple HTML, its power comes from the JavaScript APIs that interact with it, allowing developers to create complex graphical content directly in the browser.

Character Encoding

Proper character encoding ensures that text displays correctly across different browsers and devices. The UTF-8 encoding is recommended for most web pages as it supports a wide range of characters from various languages and symbol sets.

With these final HTML concepts covered, web developers can move confidently into CSS, knowing they have a solid foundation in the structural elements that make up modern web pages.

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