Special Formatting

Preformatted Text

That's what the <PRE> tag defines, preformatted text. It's a container, and it's a very special one. The <pre> tag causes whitespace on both sides of the contained text, similar to a heading tag. The text is displayed exactly as it was typed into the document with all spacing and blank lines intact. See the example below.

<pre>

Remember     the     rule     that     whitespace     doesn't      matter. 

Extra spaces between words, multiple  returns, blank lines -- all of these
     disappear in an HTML document,  due to the structural nature of HTML.

Well, almost.  There is an exception to this rule.  In a preformatted text 
     block, whitespace does matter. Suddenly, the number of spaces between
     words, tabs, and the blank lines between paragraphs,  will  be  seen. 

Here is some bold text using the <B> tag.
Here is some italic text using the <I> tag.

</pre>

Special Formatting Tags

<INLINEINPUT>	inlineinput: This is undocumented but does this for text of default size or smaller and this for larger font sizes. (Seems to only work in Netscape Navigator 4.0 or newer.)
<LISTING>	listing: displays all characters "As-Is" in the browser as a fixed-width font. Display is optimized for 132 character lines. Until a closing LISTING tag is encountered, other HTML elements are displayed on screen as text and not evaluated. The rules for this sort of behavior can have many consequences in parsing techniques, thus the use of this element is strongly discouraged. This element is rarely supported correctly in modern browsers. Example: This is a paragraph tag inside of a LISTING tag. Here is some bold and italic text.
<PLAINTEXT>	listing: used to stop the parsing of HTML tags by the browser. What follows after is not SGML. The PLAINTEXT element specification does not accept a closing tag. The text after the opening PLAINTEXT tag is typically rendered as a fixed-width font. This element is no longer standard HTML and it is considered "obsolete". Warning! No HTML tags will be parsed after this tag is used. To see what happens when this page has the <PLAINTEXT> tag added right after the <BODY> tag, click here.
<SPELL>	spell: This is undocumented but does this for text of default size or smaller and this for larger font sizes. (Seems to only work in Netscape Navigator 4.0 or newer.)
<XMP>	xmp: displays all characters "As-Is" in the browser as a fixed-width font. Display is optimized for 132 character lines. Until a closing XMP tag is encountered, other HTML elements are displayed on screen as text and not evaluated. The rules for this sort of behavior can have many consequences in parsing techniques, thus the use of this element is strongly discouraged. Unlike the <LISTING> tag, this element is usually supported correctly in modern browsers. Example: