Section 7
SIMPLIFYING EDITING 
     Now if you use a fancy web page editor, you may not care.  But, if you
are like me, and use a plain old text editor (which is really all you
need), and don't like things going off the right side of the screen...
You can use a little trick to get around things.  So, I'm going to have to
back up a bit here to explain that I quess.
     So, let's back up to the original line of text I started with.  Notice
that in the last examples I left out the 5 blank spaces at the start of the
line (because they may end up as only a single space anyway).  You can use
this idea in a slightly different way to keep things on your less than 80
character wide editing screen, and still make some really long lines of
text (that would otherwise scroll off the right side of your edit screen).
Here is how I might have entered the original text, and used only the
<CENTER> tag (the "*" shows where I would have hit Enter for a carriage
return in my text editor):
<BODY and any other options for color and background>*
<CENTER>*
So now that we have a nice Background,*
 and have all the Colors set up,*
 let's move on to putting some text on the web page.*
</CENTER>*
</BODY>*
     Notice where the "*" (or carriage return) is with no space before it.
Then notice that I did put a single space at the beginning of some of the
lines.  HTML ignores the carriage return, but uses the space on the next
line to make one whole long line of text (that would normally scroll off
the right side).  For the viewer of your web page, the <CENTER> tag will
cause the text to word wrap where ever it needs to (and include the space
between words where it doesn't word wrap).  Usually, when it word wraps, it
will ignore the space.  So this lets you keep things on your edit screen,
and still lets HTML produce something that looks right for the final viewer
of your web page.
     Here is what this looks like with the web browser you are using now:
So now that we have a nice Background, and have all the Colors set up, let's move on to putting some text on the web page. 
     Since I'm trying to keep this tutorial within 80 characters wide (for
easier editing, and also printing out), I thought you might find this a
usefull trick.  Not to mention that if you print this out it should not end
up all messed up with extra word wrapping, and everything should still work
for the HTML code the way I am showing it.  But, that will depend on some
of your printer settings, if you are printing this from your web browser
(and/or if this is the downloaded text version), and if you are using
Windows, or printing this from DOS Edit instead I quess.  Oh well, I'm
trying to make it work all possible ways, but that really is hard to do...
Just as it is hard to make anything in HTML come out exactly as you want it
because different software/web browsers do things differently.  (Does
anybody else notice how things REALLY were much easier with plain old 80
character wide ASCII text files years ago?)
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© 1999 miltst@hotmail.com
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