HTML Tag Primer

All of the letters surrounded by less than and greater than signs (<p>) are called tags. Almost all tags have an opening tag, your instructions related to the tag, and a closing tag which starts with a forward slash (</p>) 

Here is a short list of the tags you would most commonly use in Canvas.

• <p> . . . </p> is a paragraph.

• <ul> . . . <ul> is an unordered list (bullet points).

• <ol> . . . </ol> is an ordered list (numbered).

• <li> . . . </li> is an item in a list (either ordered or unordered).

• <h2>, <h3>, and <h4> are descending levels of headings. Please use these instead of changing font size manually as only text coded as headings are processed as heading by assistive technology and allow users to move from one section to the next.

• <div> . . . </div> is a container tag that lets you modify the formatting for everything inside the tag.

• <img> is an image tag - note that image tags don't have a closing tag.

• <a> . . . </a> is a link tag.

• &nbsp; isn't a tag but if you type two spaces after a sentence you'll see lots of them as it's the code for a non-breaking space. You may also see it between two words instead of a regular space (especially if you've copied and pasted from Word). If your text is breaking oddly at the end of a line you probably have an &nbsp; between two words which does not allow the line to break between theose words (hence "non-breaking" space).