Level up your HTML document with CSS Jim Hall Sat, 08/13/2022 - 03:00
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1 reader likes this

When you write documentation, whether that's for an open source project or a technical writing project, you should have two goals: The document should be written well, and the document should be easy to read. The first is addressed by clear writing skills and technical editing. The second can be addressed with a few simple changes to an HTML document.

HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, is the backbone of the internet. Since the dawn of the "World Wide Web" in 1994, every web browser uses HTML to display documents and websites. And for almost as long, HTML has supported the stylesheet, a special addition to an HTML document that defines how the text should appear on the screen.

You can write project documentation in plain HTML, and that gets the job done. However, plain HTML styling may feel a little spartan. Instead, try adding a few simple styles to an HTML document to add a little pizzazz to documentation, and make your documents clearer and easier to read.

Defining an HTML document

Let's start with a plain HTML document and explore how to add styles to it. An empty HTML document contains the definition at the top, followed by an block to define the document itself. Within the element, you also need to include a document header that contains metadata about the document, such as its title. The contents of the document body go inside a block within the parent block.

You can define a blank page with this HTML code:

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