A FILE WITH A NUMBERED LIST IN IT

HTML provides a number of markup tags for handling lists. If you bring up the "Code" popup window, and go to the Reference tab, you have a full HTML manual embedded in Dreamweaver. The <OL> tag encloses an "ordered list". The <UL> tag encloses an "unordered list." Rather than using paragraphs in the list, each item is enclosed in a <LI> (list item) tag.

  1. List Item 1 -- We use Header 1 for the above title
  2. List Item 2 -- We can either tell the <h1> tag to be center aligned, or you can enclose it in a div tag and center that. There are advantages to doing it either way.
  3. List Item 4 -- As you can see above, the broswer automatically takes care of the indentation of list items if they get to long for the line.
  4. List item 3 -- Note that the browser takes care of the numbering. This lets you avoid having to re-edit things if you decide to re-arrange the list.

    5. This paragraph is inside the list. Note that the browser indents it to match the rest of the list. I didn't know this until just now. Note that the paragraph inherits the normal above and below spacing for a paragraph, not the spacing for a list item.

  5. List item 5 -- there is no list item 5.

This is a plain paragraph outside of the list tag.

There are a lot of advantages to using these tags rather than typing a list as a bunch of paragraphs and/or line breaks. For one, the way the browser displays this stuff by default is fairly sensible, with reasonable indentation and spacing, and the markup (the HTML text itself) is cleaner and more understandable. The OL tag also includes attrributes that you can set to further customize the look (for example using letters or roman numerals instead of numbers, or forcing a different start number.

Later on, you'll see that using these tags will give you a great amount of control over the appearance of your list. Part of the philosophy of "Markup languages" such as HTML is to describe the document structure (a heading, some paragraphs and a list with 5 items) rather than how it is formatted.