It's impossible to have different indentation settings within a single buffer and I'm not sure I've ever seen such a feature in a text editor. Write HTML in an *.html file, JavaScript in a *.js file, and CSS in a *.css file. Not only this has been an industry-wide best practice for a very long time (separation of concern is important) but it also allows you to have different indentation rules for different filetypes if you really want that. The W3C (HTML and CSS) and the TC39 working group (JS) don't mandate or recommend any indentation rule so there's no reason whatsoever to have different indentation rules in the first place, at least at this stage. Companies and open source projects may have specific requirements but you are not there so don't waste your time on that. More on reddit.com

I'm a very old person who was involved with the Web back when the first standards document came out. I will give you the technical history of it. HTML 1, back when the Web was initiated, didn't really have a "standards document." People at CERN and other huge organizations just called Tim Berners-Lee and asked what formatting commands they could use, and then did it. He once said in an interview that he had a floppy disk with a list of formatting commands on it, and he just used sneaker-net to distribute it. However, HTML 2 quickly followed, and was a standard. So, we can look at it: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt That super old document is from back in 1994 & 1995, as the Web was creeping into popular awareness. You can see a few important quotes from it. For example: Typically, paragraphs are surrounded by a vertical space of one line or half a line. The first line in a paragraph is indented in some cases. So the people making the Web happen suggested that paragraphs have vertical space, and maaayybe an indent. People following the standard implemented the must-haves and left out the optionals. Also, this gem is from the same document: Documents should not contain tab characters, as they are not supported consistently. Now, that comment has to do with preformatted text (think blocks of code), but it nonetheless reflects a thinking that is affecting us still today. Back then, we didn't have a glorious, universal character set for the Web (UTF-8). So something written on a Mac would look like crap on a Windows computer, and both would be a mess on a Unix/Linux computer. And something from Japan would be unreadable on a US computer. Nothing was interchangeable, everything broke. So the Web guys basically said "Screw it, anything that isn't A-Z or 0-9 is OUT." Tabs were not popular due to wonkiness. That's an oversimplification, but if I want to stop typing anytime soon, it'll have to do. :) Other factors came into play quickly. Forms were invented -- yes, invented; they didn't exist at first on the Web and were a revelation -- and tabbing from field to field was normal. In addition, HTML was based upon SGML, and whitespace is designated to collapse in such specifications. What this means is that if you put 2 spaces after a period, which I do, as all old people do, then the rules for the Web say "collapse that down to 1." My 2 spaces are there, in the code under the Web page, but the display of my writing is different: everything is single spaces everywhere. Same is supposed to go for tabs, carriage returns (new lines), and anything else that is white space. If you put in a bunch of white space, it's supposed to collapse down to almost nothing. So you have a bunch of people who got used to tab as a key to move through forms rather than a key to indent (and trying to submit text with a tab IN it is still difficult to this day), and you have tabs getting collapsed down to almost no space at all anyway thanks to the standards documents insisting it be so. Because of this, we were almost forced to use carriage returns, as it was one of the only visually distinct ways to break up a document (and even that isn't truly reliable; don't get me started on the Windows/Mac/Linux differences in new lines and carriage returns). It's a historical leftover and nobody has to follow it anymore, but just like roads being a set width thanks to wagons in ancient Rome, we follow it anyway. tl;dr When we see a pretty Web page, underneath it's actually a super-ugly jumble of formatting codes that have a history of not respecting white space, and therefore the only "big" way to insert some visible organization was a carriage return. More on reddit.com

... is not a valid HTML tag, you mean to use

...

And what you're looking for would be text-indent: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-indent edit: example: https://codepen.io/tijsvl/pen/KKOBLqQ More on reddit.com