TryAgain2 wrote:The "textarea" that I drop onto layout in Dreamweaver can be set to readonly or editable. I wanted to use it for displaying text generated by PHP script. Ambush hit it on the head; I want the scrollbars. CSS gives me a headache (notice I used the depreciated <font color> -I couldn't work out the equivalent in css), but I'll look up css overflow as suggested.
The textarea would have been fine, except that it displays tags.
A textarea wouldn't even have been semi-fine. You need to understand that HTML tags all have a purpose and it's not about
how the data is displayed, but
what data is being displayed. Textareas exist to enable multi-line input, and the readonly attribute is there to let your users know that even if they try to alter it, it won't matter because you've already saved it in the back-end. Anyone (developers, especially) can remove the readonly attribute and modify it, but we put it there as an indicator, not a rule.
Just like the "list" you are making. Line breaks (<br />) don't exist to list items, but to end lines abruptly when necessary. Lists are made using list tags (<ul>, <ol>, etc.) and list item tags (<li>, etc.). Every tag that we have in HTML has a meaning, and the few that "don't" (span and div) exist for anything that is not already defined as a tag. Using tags correctly will make your HTML make more sense, be more friendly to handicapped users, and can easily improve your search engine ranking, as every reputable search engine uses HTML mark-up and it's actual meanings to decipher important keywords, content, and relevance. Also, using proper CSS will decrease file-sizes, which is considered friendlier by Google (not sure about others).
I'd suggest you look into CSS and maybe into a list of HTML tags and their purposes.