White space is an important element of design, and one that we often take for granted when working with word-processing or page-layout programs. With those types of programs, if we want to add several blank lines to the page, we just do it and see the results immediately. Want to break a line of text? Just add a hard return to the text. Things are not quite so simple in XHTML. White space in our file is ignored by the browser, so if we want to see it in our final document, we're going to have to add it specifically using tags.