Paragraphs

The <P> element is used to define a paragraph. The exact rendering (indentation, leading etc.) is not defined and may be a function of other tags, style sheets, etc. The ALIGN attribute can be used to explicitly specify the horizontal alignment. Paragraph elements have the same content model as headers, that is text and character level markup, such as character emphasis, inline images, form fields and math.

Example:

<H1>The heading precedes the first paragraph</H1>
<P>Here is the text of the first paragraph. <P>and this is
the text of the second paragraph.

The text up to the next <p> element is treated as being part of the current paragraph. This is an example of how SGML allows certain end tags like </p> to be left out where they can be inferred from the context.

Word Wrapping

Netscape includes two tags: <NOBR>...</NOBR>, and <WBR>. The former turns off wordwrapping between the start and end NOBR tag, while WBR is for the rare case when you want to specify where to break the line if needed. Should HTML 3.0 provide an equivalent mechanism to WBR, (either a tag or an entity)?

Note: Do not use empty paragraphs to add white space around headings, lists or other elements. White space is added by the rendering software.

Permitted Attributes

ID

An SGML identifier used as the target for hypertext links or for naming particular elements in associated style sheets. Identifiers are NAME tokens and must be unique within the scope of the current document.

LANG

This is one of the ISO standard language abbreviations, e.g. "en.uk" for the variation of English spoken in the United Kingdom. It can be used by parsers to select language specific choices for quotation marks, ligatures and hypenation rules etc. The language attribute is composed from the two letter language code from ISO 639, optionally followed by a period and a two letter country code from ISO 3166.

CLASS

This a space separated list of SGML NAME tokens and is used to subclass tag names. For instance, <P CLASS=abstract> defines a paragraph that acts as an abstract. By convention, the class names are interpreted hierarchically, with the most general class on the left and the most specific on the right, where classes are separated by a period. The CLASS attribute is most commonly used to attach a different style to some element, but it is recommended that where practical class names should be picked on the basis of the element's semantics, as this will permit other uses, such as restricting search through documents by matching on element class names. The conventions for choosing class names are outside the scope of this specification.

ALIGN

Paragraphs are usually rendered flush left. The ALIGN attribute can be used to explicitly specify the horizontal alignment:

align=left

The paragraph is rendered flush left (the default).

align=center

The paragraph is centered.

align=right

The paragraph is rendered flush right.

align=justify

Text lines are justified where practical, otherwise this gives the same effect as the default align=left setting.

For example:

<p align=center>This is a centered paragraph.
<p align=right>and this is a flush right paragraph.

CLEAR

This attribute is common to all block-like elements. When text flows around a figure or table in the margin, you sometimes want to start an element like a header, paragraph or list below the figure rather than alongside it. The CLEAR attribute allows you to move down unconditionally:

clear=left

move down until left margin is clear

clear=right

move down until right margin is clear

clear=all

move down until both margins are clear

Alternatively, you can decide to place the element alongside the figure just so long as there is enough room. The minimum width needed is specified as:

clear="40 en"

move down until there is at least 40 en units free

clear="100 pixels"

move down until there is at least 100 pixels free

The style sheet (or browser defaults) may provide default minimum widths for each class of block-like elements.

NOWRAP

The NOWRAP attribute is used when you don't want the browser to automatically wrap lines. You can then explicitly specify line breaks in paragraphs using the BR element. For example:

<p nowrap>This paragraph has wordwrap turned off<br>
and the BR element is used for explicit line breaks