Can't get a 'break'

Adding empty paragraphs won't work, because browsers won't render them, they're simply ignored. This could be the source of your frustration. Spaces (" ") or line returns (return/enter key) are ignored too.

If you want more control over the spacing, try adding some bottom margin to your li elements, and inside them use p tags. Close the p and start a new one when you want a line break.

If you tried to put br tags inside your lists, but outside of the list items, those will be ignored too because the only things allowed directly inside uls and ols are the list item tags (yes, HTML has a lot of rules that don't immediately make sense.)

Line breaks are a way to visually format content, and HTML isn't really designed to say anything about how content looks. If you have a list of things, all the HTML can do for you is say what the things in the list are. In order to change how the list looks, which is what putting spaces in will do, then CSS is a better tool for that. The opinionated people who made HTML even decided to completely disallow line breaks inside lists in order to enforce the separation of HTML (content) and CSS (appearance).

Using CSS is a lot easier than putting lots of br tags everywhere, because with 3 lines of CSS code you can add spacing to your list items and paragraphs, instead of having to put line breaks every single place that spacing is needed!

Ah. I can't write code on these things. In the second sentence, it should read "so I put a few (less than, p, greater than, less than, forward slash, p, greater than)s in to break it up..." And there should be "less than, b, r, greater than" in the empty brackets in the penultimate sentence. Ta.

I suggest you to take a closer look into positioning text with the help of CSS if you struggle. It's easy to learn and everything will get so much more easier working with HTML&CSS. Good job and good luck with the website project!

Thanks, I do have a stylesheet for my page, but that doesn't change the fact that if I ask for an empty paragraph or break in the HTML, I should get an empty paragraph or break!

OK... but I did see a treehouse basic example in which Nick filled his html with empty paragraphs and he got empty paragraphs... and what about the fact that breaks won't work either?

I need space around my lists, nested lists as well as paragraphs. Looks like I'm going to end up doing it in the stylesheet but I'm still unhappy that I don't understand why I can't get what I thought I should get.

body { line-height: 1.4em; } ul li { margin-bottom: 1em; }