Extras

Amongst the dozens of HTML elements we've neglected, there are one or two that didn't fit neatly into this presentation but are sometimes useful.

Horizontal line

You can create a line right across the page, such as the one at the bottom of this page, using the <hr> tag.

Special characters

Sometimes you may want to include special characters in your text. These might be non-English characters or symbols such as † or they may be characters that HTML uses for its tags, such as < and >. You can include these characters using &# followed by a number that is the ASCII code for the character you want. You can use a semi-colon after the number if you need to separate it from whatever follows.

Email links

The <a href=mailto:abc500@york.ac.uk>email me</a> construct produces a link that, when clicked on, sets up an email addressed to abc100 at york.ac.uk. This is extremely useful except for one unfortunate thing: spammers can find them easily. In fact spammers routinely set up automated searches for mailto: tags to harvest hundreds of thousands of email addresses. There are some ways to make life harder for them, but the safest option is not to use them.