<p> tag or <br> tag

Best one to use

[bartainer]

Hello,

Okay, is it better for all to use the <p> tag or the <b> tag? Is the <p> tag becoming deprecated?

[avendus]

umm <b> is for bold is it not? so I think you are asking <br> for break line or <p> for paragraph. It depends on the layout of your site and what you are trying to accomplish.... <br> just make the line go down once, but a <p> forces two spaces between text.

[bartainer]

Yes, I'm sorry, it is <br>...too much wine! However, is the <p> tag becoming abolished? Going back to the <b> tag, is it wise to use it instead on the <strong> tag?

[mattglet]

If you are worried about depreciation, then you should technically start using CSS to style your font. Instead of <b>, you would use:

<span style = "font-weight: bold">Text here</span>

[tedster]

The <p> tag indicates a paragraph, and that is a semantic unit -- a meaningful unit of language. It's not really a layout instruction, although browsers do contain default instructions for how to render paragraphs when they render your html document on screen.

But those are just the default instructions -- how much space goes between two paragraphs (or between a paragraph and another element on the page) is completely under your control with CSS.

To think of a <p> element as forcing two breaks is not an accurate mental model, although it's a natural enough assumption. There is really only one break, but there is also a margin added onto top and bottom of the invisible "box" that holds the paragraph.

For more information on this great adventure, see the W3C's document about the "Box Model"
[w3.org...]

[kaled]

For adding blank space at the end of a page, what is considered best practice.

I commonly see (and sometimes use) <p>&nbsp;</p> repeated. However, repeated <br> seems to work just as well and is less code.

Any thoughts?

Kaled.

[jetboy]

Why not just add CSS padding or margin to your last element, or create a class to do the same?

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis a erat eget neque dignissim imperdiet.</p>

<p class="last">Nam a diam. Pellentesque neque risus, luctus non, laoreet eget, eleifend vel, lectus.</p>

p.last { margin-bottom: 50px; }

[encyclo]

To answer your questions about deprecation, none of the elements

<p>

<br>

or

<b>

have been deprecated in any current standard. They each have specific meanings: a

<p>

is a paragraph versus

<br>

- a simple line-break within an already-defined block-level unit.

<b>

remains as a non-semantic element which usually triggers a bold typeface. It does not have the exact same sense as

<strong>

which is a semantic way of indicating emphasis.

<span style="font-weight: bold">Text here</span>

One thing about the above: you aren't really gaining much here over using

<b>

. Neither

<b>

nor

<span>

have a semantic meaning, so why not use the shorter

<b>

instead? I often use

<b>

or

<i>

instead of

<span>

, but with specific CSS styles associeted with them (and not necessarily bold or italic) as then the page is viewed unstyled, the difference shows between the sections of text shown in bold or italic compared to the rest of the text.

[kaled]

You can also apply css to <b> and <i>. I've done this in a bolded paragraph to make <b> text red, since it would otherwise not stand out.

Kaled.