How to insert line breaks and non-breaking spaces in XHTML?

The above question is commonly asked by an XHTML beginner. In our previous primer we learned that XHTML documents do not understand the end of the paragraph if you press the enter key to insert a line in your text editor. When you want to begin a new paragraph you start a new element with <p> and end it with </p>. We are now capable of conveniently writing paragraphs of text using the <p>...</p> tag.

How to insert line breaks in XHTML documents?

Yesterday, I had to upload a table and a paragraph of text in one of our websites built on Drupal CMS. I prepared the content in OpenOffice.org Writer. I quickly inserted a table and typed the text in a paragraph in OO Writer. I also added some colors to the table to enhance the look and feel of the document. I thought I could easily replicate the design in the Drupal CMS.

I logged in to Drupal and inserted the post with the table and text content. This post defaced the ambiance of the whole web page. The table was displayed in the extreme right and I had to use the horizontal scroll bar in the browser to see the content. The post needed CSS to fix the problem.

I am developing a solution to add a custom CSS file to Drupal from several days. Due to stringent deadlines of the existing projects I'm unable to spend much time on it. The idea of WYSIWYG editor flashed in my mind. I quickly downloaded the TinyMCE software from Moxicode and the TinyMCE module from Drupal. Installed them on the local copy of the Drupal site. The WYSIWYG editor never turned up in the content posting area. I had to spend some more time to fix the installation issue. I did not have enough time to fiddle with WYSIWYG editor installation.

I looked at other alternatives. I exported the OO Writer file to HTML which gave me only 800 lines of XHTML. Inserting 800 lines of XHTML markup was really not worth for a small post.

Finally, I copied and pasted the table from OO Writer to OO Draw. Exported the table as a jpeg image. Uploaded the image and inserted the text in the Drupal site. Added a one liner markup to float the image to the right of the text paragraph. That gave me what I wanted.

The <p>...</p> Tag. Creating Paragraphs In Web Pages.
In the last primer we learned how to create a web page. In this primer we will study how to publish an HTML document with more text.

Just like our previous example we will write the DTD, Head and Body section of the document.