HTML Encyclopaedia

The address tag

The HTML container element

<address> ... </address>
is intended for information such as addresses, telephone numbers, etc., appearing within a document.

The devisors of HTML hoped that this would be used to enclose addresses so that addresses could be recognised as such by indexing and cataloguing software. The enclosed text is commonly rendered using an italic typeface. Although addresses usually consist of several lines, line breaks within <address> ... </address> are not honoured and it is necessary to use <br> tags to cause line breaks.

Here's an example

World Wide Web Consortium
Department of Computer Science
545 Technology Square
Cambridge, MA 02139
USA
Here's the HTML
<address>
World Wide Web Consortium<br>
Department of Computer Science<br>
545 Technology Square<br>
Cambridge, MA 02139<br>
USA<br>
</address>


Browsers

There are wide variations in how this tag is handled by various browsers The HTML 3.2 standard requires the browser insert paragraph breaks before and after. Only ARA and MOS3 conformed to the standard. IE3 even forgot to come out of italic text style, a bug fixed in IE4 which still doesn't manage the required paragraph breaks. OP2 managed a paragraph break at the start but not at the end.


See also <blockquote>, <listing>, <plaintext>, <pre>, <xmp> and the general notes on text styles