However, it is possible to indent the first line of a paragraph three different ways. The first two stay within the confines of "standard" HTML; the second uses a Netscape extension.
The simplest way to indent a paragraph is to place an empty transparent
image at the beginning of the paragraph. The image will be rendered as
nothing more than blank space, and the paragraph will appear to be
indented. If you check the source of this document and download the
image at the beginning of this paragraph, you'll see that I used a one
pixel high, 64 pixel wide image to effect a 64 pixel indentation.
The downside to this technique is that the browser must download an image to create the effect. Of course, the image is very small (just 48 bytes) and should wind up in the browser's cache after the first download. Still, every extra element adds some time to the download process.
entity. To indent a paragraph five spaces (like this one),
just put five non-breaking spaces at the beginning of the paragraph.
The good part about this technique is that almost all browsers can handle the
entity. The downside is that you cannot control indentation to the pixel level, and the size
of a non-breaking space will vary from browser to browser.
<spacer> tag. Of course, this only works in Netscape
3.0, but the tag provides a number of interesting formatting
capabilities.
There are five attributes for the <spacer> tag. The
most important one is the type attribute, which determines
the kind of space to be
inserted in the document. Acceptable values are horizontal, to insert
horizontal space, vertical, to insert vertical space, and
block, to create the equivalent of a completely transparent
image.
Horizontal spacers simply insert space into the current line before
rendering the next element on the line. They can be used to create
extra space between words or, as I did a few lines back, an indented
paragraph. The amount of space inserted is specified by the
size attribute.
Vertical spacers cause a line break, like a <br> tag.
They then insert some amount of vertical space before displaying the
next line of the document. The amount of vertical space is expressed in
pixels using the size attribute.
Block spacers create a rectangular blank area in your document. The
size of the block is expressed in pixels using the width
and height attributes; the alignment of the block with
respect to the surrounding text is provided by the align
attribute using one of the seven alignment types discussed above, plus
the values left and right to cause text to
flow around the block after it has been moved to the appropriate margin.
In a nutshell, here are the three kinds of spacers you can create, with all their expected attributes:
<spacer type=horizontal size=32>
<spacer type=vertical size=16>
<spacer type=block height=50 width=75 align=absmiddle>
The first spacer inserts 32 pixels of space into the current line before
the next element is rendered in the line. The second forces a line
break, moves down sixteen pixels, and resumes displaying the remainder
of the document. The last example creates an empty block 50 pixels
wide and 75 pixels tall and aligns the middle of the block with the middle
of the current line of text.
It should be obvious now how to indent a paragraph using a
<spacer> tag. Just add
<spacer type=horizontal size=64>
before a paragraph to create a 64 pixel indent, like I did above.