<spacer> tag
Netscape developed the <spacer>tag as useful aid to site design. Sadly its not been picked up by their rivals or the W3C HTML specs (except for WebTV !!!) Essentially the <spacer> tag create an are of transparent space on a webpage. This can be useful in controlling tables.
Here is a set of 1 X1 table illustrating how you can create spacer of any size (sorry Internet explorer and some other browser users will see nothing) | | | | width="5" height="5" | width="10" height="10" | width="55" height="15" | width="25" height="55" |
The <spacer> tag doesn't need closure (e.g. </spacer> is unnecessary) to make it work you'll need to set the following attributes - type
- The examples above are where type="block". You can use "vertical", which sets spacer between 2 lines of text, or "horizontal", which sets a spacer between characters on the same line
Width and height- Self explanatory. Set how big you want your space in pixels for Block spacers (only for block spacers)
Size - The equivalent to width and height for vertical and horizontal spacers
align- aligns the spacer with text as you do for <img> tags
Now, there are several solutions to replicate the effects of spacers - (1) hspace and vspace
You've seen this before but remember you can use this to control the space around an image
for example this pichas a hspace of 10 whilst this one has a hspace of 20
(2) The nonbreak space special character ( or  ) You can use the special character for nonbreaking space to separate out text. Remember you can't have 2 spaces in a row on HTML text, well that's not strictly true
e.g. <h4>I have used 3 space character in a row</h4>
would give
I have used 3 space characters in a row (3) transparent .gif This is perhaps the most useful of all. Remember you can warp the size of any image to fit any sized space. Well if you make a 1 x1 pixel that is completely transparent you can warp this to fit any sized space
| | | | width="5" height="5" | width="10" height="10" | width="55" height="15" | width="25" height="55" |
This gives the same result and works on the vast bulk of browsers. We've created one which you candownload in a zip file (makes getting an invisible item easier) |