3: Text Commands
The following commands are all 'inline' tags, to be used in the normal flow of text (like the EM tag). They are used in the usual way, a start and end tag surrounding the text you wish to mark.
- SAMP
- Sample output of a program. Complements CODE, described in the beginners tutorial, which is the program itself.
- KBD
- Keyboard. Or, what the reader is supposed to type on their keyboard. Handy for tutorials and suchlike.
- VAR
- Variable. Used with code snippets or when talking about code in a paragraph.
- ABBR
- Abbreviation. Indicates an abbreviation. There is a 'title' element that goes within the opening tag that contains the full text of the abbreviation.
- ACRONYM
- Similar to ABBR, but specific to TLA's. You can also use the 'lang' element to specify what language the acronym (and abbreviation) is in. It's only polite, after all.
And there are also two more, that are not formatting markup tags. They provide logical (but invisible) structure to your document, to make it much easier to add stylesheet formatting to the document. They are DIV and SPAN.
DIV is a 'block-level' tag, much like P, except that DIV can encompass several paragraphs and other things, and give the whole big group an id for the stylesheet's use, among other things.
SPAN is an 'inline' tag, and can be used to identify small portions of text within a paragraph. This is especially useful for identifying things that HTML has no tag for, like telephone numbers. If you surround a phone number with SPAN tags with a class="phone" element inside the opening tag, you can then specify later in a stylesheet that all phone numbers shall be displayed in bold purple type. Or something. I used the SPAN tag liberally in this tutorial, mostly to mark out tags, as you can see in the source for this page.
