h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am writing my first entry, and as I have knowledge of HTML I thought I'd have a go at Guide ML. I am trying to use the line break tag. In HTML the tag does not need a so I tried to apply this logic and this is the error message I got: BR tag must be empty (warning). So I put after and the error message then said that it was expecting a P after it. I don't want to start a new paragraph. How do I implement a line break?

Like this:

*applauds Ottox*

and from AGB who is sitting at my table atm.

Lotti, that was the hardest thing I had to remember, kept me cursing at the screen for ages trying to work it out when I first started using Guide ML.

It's one of the most difficult things to get used to between HTML and XML - when we all start using XHTML to write web pages there'll be a lot of gnashing of teeth over that, assuming web browsers actually enforce XML syntax. Which they won't.

Yeah, the W3C is really getting annoyed about the whole HTML/XHTML/XML thing. The problem is that there are uncountable amounts of pages out there, and the W3C wants them ALL in XML.

It's just impossible to do, the only thing being to enforce browser strictness to XML, but M'Soft and NS don't want to alienate current websites, as that'd ruin thier ratings (as people would need to use other browsers to access the HTML pages).

At the moment, if you're learning page design, stick to XHTML, which is basicly HTML with XML rules (lower case, closing tags, quoted attributes etc.) as this will make your pages future-proof.

The thing is needed because all XML tags need closing tags. is not allowed, because it is an empty element - it cannot contain any text. isn't allowed because it doesn't close.

The closing tag rule for empty elements also applies to the following tags in XML (amongst others):

META
HR
BASE
OPTION
LINK
IMG
Loads of other elements, the above are the most common ones.

Hope that that helped!

Of course, tags are evil and should be avoided if at all possible.

iReally? My personal website is lttered with them.

How are MERA tags evil? They can give searchers an accurate description fo your site on a search engine, increase your rankings on engines, automaticly refresh pages...

Not many search engines use meta tags anymore. Auto-refresh of pages has frequently been misused which makes me hate it immensely.

I don't auto refresh my page, but I didn't realise the meta tags were not used any more. I'll have to look into it when I redo my web page. (hahahaha!)
I'm thinking of writing something about search engines anyway for the guide.