use display:block to render an element as a block
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title></title> <style type="text/css"> em { display: block; } </style> </head> <body> <em>em <code>display:block</code></em> <em>em</em> <br /> </body> </html>