The Paragraph element indicates a paragraph of text. No specification has ever attempted to define exactly the indentation of paragraph blocks and this may be a function of other elements, style sheets, etc.

Typically, paragraphs should be surrounded by a vertical space of between one and one and a half lines.. With some HTML user agents, the first line in a paragraph may be indented.

Example of use:

<H1>The Paragraph element</H1>
<P>The paragraph element is used to denote paragraph blocks</P>
<P>This would be the second paragraph.</P>

Included since the HTML 3.2 specification is the ability to align paragraphs. Basically, the ALIGN=left|center|right attribute and values were been added to the <P> element.

e.g :

<P ALIGN=LEFT> ... </P>

All text with in the paragraph will be aligned to the left side of the page layout. This setting is equal to the default <P> element.

<P ALIGN=CENTER> ... </P>

All text within the paragraph will be aligned to the centre of the page. (c.f. <CENTER> ... </CENTER>)

All text will be aligned to the right side of the page.

Internet Explorer (4.0 and above) also support the use of the TITLE attribute. This can be used for informational purposes, with Internet Explorer treating the value of the TITLE attribute as a 'ToolTip' which is displayed when the reader passes their mouse over the contents of the <P> element. For example, adding :

. . .TITLE="A right-justified paragraph"

to the above example, the section displays as :

All this text will be aligned to the right side of the page

LANG="language setting"
The LANG attribute can be used to specify what language the <P> element is using. It accepts any valid ISO standard language abbreviation (for example "en" for English, "de" for German etc.) For more details, see the Document Localisation section for more details.

LANGUAGE="Scripting language"
The LANGUAGE attribute can be used to expressly specify which scripting language Internet Explorer 4.0 uses to interpret any scripting information used in the <P> element. It can accept values of vbscript, vbs, javascript or jscript. The first two specify the scripting language as Visual Basic Script, the latter two specify it as using Javascript (the default scripting language used if no LANGUAGE attribute is set.

CLASS="Style Sheet class name"
The CLASS attribute is used to specify the <P> element as using a particular style sheet class. For example, a style sheet class defined as:

<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
.FirstPara {text-indent : 0.5in;
margin-left : 1in}
</STYLE>

could then be referenced as:

<P CLASS="FirstPara">The first line of this paragraph will be slightly indented from the rest of the text, which will then flow neatly down the left margin. Note that the whole paragraph is also indented.</P>

and would display as:

The first line of this paragraph will be slightly indented from the rest of the text, which will then flow neatly down the left margin. Note that the whole paragraph is also indented.

See the Style Sheets overview for more information and style sheet settings.

STYLE="In line style setting"
As well as using previously defined style sheet settings, the <P> element can have in-line stylings attached to it. For example:

<P STYLE="{text-indent : 0.5in;margin-left : 1in}">An indented paragraph, with leading space on the first line</P>

would display as the above example. See the Style Sheets section for more details about style sheet settings.

ID="Unique element identifier"
The ID attribute can be used to either reference a unique style sheet identifier, or to provide a unique name for the <P> element for scripting purposes. Any <P> element with an ID attribute can be directly manipulated in script by referencing its ID attribute, rather than working through the All collection to determine the element. See the Scripting introduction topic for more information.

Every <P> element in a document is an object that can be manipulated through scripting. Note that scripting of the <P> element/object is only supported by Internet Explorer 4.0 in its Dynamic HTML object model. Netscape does not support direct scripting of the <P> element at all.

<P...> Properties
As well as supporting all of the standard Dynamic HTML properties (i.e. className, document, id, innerHTML, innerText, isTextEdit, lang, language, offsetHeight, offsetLeft, offsetParent, offsetTop, offsetWidth, outerHTML, outerText, parentElement, parentTextEdit, sourceIndex, style, tagName and title), the <P> element also supports the extra align property, which reflects any ALIGN attribute settings for the paragraph. Details of the standard properties can be found in the standard Dynamic HTML properties topics.

<P...> Methods
The <P...> element/object supports all of the standard Dynamic HTML methods (i.e. click, contains, getAttribute, insertAdjacentHTML, insertAdjacentText, removeAttribute, scrollIntoView and setAttribute). Details of these can be found in the standard Dynamic HTML Methods topics.

<P...> Events
The <P...> element/object supports all of the standard Dynamic HTML events (i.e. onclick, ondblclick, ondragstart, onfilterchange, onhelp, onkeydown, onkeypress, onkeyup, onmousedown, onmousemove, onmouseout, onmouseover, onmouseup and onselectstart). Details of these can be found in the standard Dynamic HTML events topics.

© 1995-1998, Stephen Le Hunte

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