They just don't build websites like they used to. And, you know what? Normally, that's a good thing.
I'll admit that, at first, I was pretty skeptical about the idea of building a website today the way that I would have done it back in 1998. Can you blame me? Those were the bad old days. You'd spend literally hours tweaking your styles to get one pixel to go back into its box, and I probably have brain cancer from some of the table layouts I wrote. Or from all of them. And yet here I am. What is wrong with me?
Maybe I miss the simpler world I used to live in. Maybe I like the idea of being able to maintain a website without connections to several different databases and without having to write code in four or five different languages. Maybe it would be nice, just for a little while to pretend that it still was 1998, that the internet was still all new to me, and that we could all still do or find anything as long as we click through enough indexes or webrings or search pages...
I know it's not true. I know the world has changed forever since then. I know that better than most people: I actually make things like this for a living.
But I can dream, can't I?
No, you can't insert a tab. No, it's not some magic tab you haven't found yet. No, it is also not considered kosher to just add a lot of non-breaking spaces and hope that will look right. The right way to do it is via CSS, either by using the style attribute for the element you want to style or by defining a style rule that applies to that element in your CSS.
Because I don't want to have all my paragraphs start off with indentation, I'm going to create a class and apply a rule to that. If you want all your paragraphs to be indented, you could just apply your rule to the `p` element itself.
This paragraph paragraph has my indentation style applied. The style is called "indent" in my CSS file, which you can examine at style.css on this page. There's not really a lot in it, and the code for this page is itself pretty simple, so you shouldn't have any trouble reverse engineering what I did. For my purposes, it was important that this style be applied only to paragraphs with the indent class, so you can see that `p.indent` was the target for the rule. You could just make the target `p` if you want.
I guess if that turns out not to be the case, you can hit me up and ask what's going on.