untitled

HTML didn’t have an indentation capability, so people resorted to inserting

invisible images and other tricks. (Adding spaces doesn’t work because

HTML strips extra spaces off.)

CSS came to the rescue with its text-indentproperty. Used with block-level

elements like <p>, you can specify a unit length like 6emor 7px, or a relative

percentage.

Here’s the way you specify indentation for a paragraph, as shown in

Figure 7-15:

p {font-size:24px; text-indent: 2em;}

Texturing ......................................................................................................

Most Web sites look best with some background textures and graphics. Plain

background colors are rather crude, but a nice, restrained, pale texture

behind your text improves many a Web page. Add some well-placed graphics

and you can bring the drabbest page to life. Textures also help to unify a

page, tying the various zones together.

As with drop-shadows and many other visual effects that you might want

to add to a Web page, your best approach when adding backgrounds is to

design them in a graphics application such as Photoshop.

For example, you can create a background out of a small, repeating texture.

The example in Figure 7-16 tiles a tiny 1'' piece of texture across the entire

background of the browser. It works much the same way that tiling textures

Figure 7-15:
In most
publications,
text is
indented.
HTML has
no pro-
vision for
indentation,
but CSS has
the text-
indent
property.

Chapter 7: Styling It Your Way 143