Chapter 12

</h2></center>

How do I make some text bigger or smaller?

Put the <big> and </big>, or <small> and </small> tags around it.

How do I lay out tabular information?

The simplest way to do it is with the <PRE> and </PRE> tags. These will cause whatever is within them to be displayed as plain text, just as it was in the original, so that spaces separate the entries just as they did in the text version. You can also use this for poetry, though you usually won't need to. It's not entirely satisfactory, but it will work.

Making a full HTML table requires you to use the <table>, <tr> (table row), and <td> (table detail) tags, among others, and a full exposition of tables is beyond the scope of this FAQ.

Briefly, you start a table with the <table> tag. <table>

</table>

For each row you want in the table, you open and close a table row <tr> tag, like:

<table> <tr> </tr>

<tr> </tr> </table>

and then for each cell within a row, you specify a <td> tag and the contents of that cell:

<table> <tr> <td>This is the Top Left cell</td> <td>This is the Top Right cell</td> </tr> <tr> <td>This is the Bottom Left cell</td> <td>This is the Bottom Right cell</td> </tr> </table>

This only scratches the surface of tables. However, there are many guides available on the Web, and they're easy to find, once you know which tags you're looking for. A brief discussion of tables is provided by the W3C as part of the HTML 4.01 spec at <http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html#h-11.5> and the tutorial at <http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Advanced.html> also shows how to make HTML tables.

Step 9. Some common problems

When you're just starting to code HTML, it may seem that errors are coming at you from all sides. Tidy may spew out a stream of complaints that you don't recognize or understand. If it's any consolation, this is normal!

Just take the error list one line at a time, starting at the top. Often, one actual mistake, like not closing a tag, may cause many errors, since an unclosed tag can cause many subsequent tags to be reported as errors.

Common errors include:

1. Simple typos in tags, like <h2Chapter 3</h2> instead of <h2>