Description

The <p> tag defines a paragraph. The <p> element is the most commonly used block-level element. However, it cannot contain block-level elements (including <p> itself).

The following table summarizes the usages context and the version history of this tag.

Placement:Block
Content:Inline and text
Start/ End Tag:Start tag: required, End tag: optional
Version:HTML 2, 3.2, 4, 4.01, 5
  1. As a logical element, empty paragraphs are ignored by the browsers, so do not use empty <p> elements to add blank lines in your web pages. To create blank lines use the <br> tag, or use the CSS margin property instead.
  2. When you use the <p> element to begin a paragraph, it automatically creates some space (margin) above and below the content. This space is applied by the browser's built-in style sheets, but you can override it using CSS margin property.

Syntax

The basic syntax of the <p> tag is given with:

HTML/XHTML: <p> ... </p>

The example below shows the <div> tag in action.

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
<p>This is another paragraph.</p>

Note: In HTML, the end tag for the <p> element may be omitted. In XHTML, the <p> tag must be properly closed i.e. both start tag and end tag are required.

Tag-Specific Attributes

The following table shows the attributes that are specific to the <p> tag.

Global Attributes

Like all other HTML tags, the <p> tag supports the global attributes in HTML5.

Event Attributes

The <p> tag also supports the event attributes in HTML5.

Browser Compatibility

Element
<p>YesYesYesYesYes