Formatting your message with html tags

I've been asked by taiwandave to put together a quick summary of some html tags that you might find beneficial in creating your posts.

I will cover the following topics:

A) bold
B) italic
C) underline
D) quotation
E) nesting
F) hyperlinking

Note: I have deliberately put spaces between the brackets ("<" and ">") in the following examples. These spaces here are necessary to show you the tags. But when you create your tags, be sure to have no spaces. You should note that the opening tag does not contain a slash but the closing tag does contain a slash.

A) Bold

To bold something, you need to surround the text with the proper html tag. In this case it is the bold tags: bold.

B) Italic

To italicize something, you need to surround the text with the proper html tag. In this case it is the italic tags: italic.

C) Underline

To underline something, you need to surround the text with the proper html tag. In this case it is the underline tags: underline.

D)

Quote

To quote something, you need to surround the text with the proper html tag. In this case it is the quote tags: and .

Quote is different from the prior tags. It is known as a block level tag. By that, I mean that you cannot simply quote part of sentence and have the whole thing fit on the line properly. To make that statement more readily understood, let's look at an example.

You said to me yesterday, "I should be very careful when I ride my motorcycle in the National Parks."

Here we want to quote the "quoted" text, so we might be tempted to write the following:

You said to me yesterday, I should be very careful when I ride my motorcycle in the National Parks.

Now this is how it looks.

You said to me yesterday,

I should be very careful when I ride my motorcycle in the National Parks.

Notice how it is now on two lines? Look at our topic D, a few lines above. Again, two lines.

For block level tags, such as , you need to have it on its own separate line. The other tags (bold, italic, underline) are known as line tags, and they are fine to use on just portions of a line.

That is a perfect segue to discussing nesting.

E) Nesting

You can combine more than one tag in a sentence. But you need to close the tags in the opposite order you began the tags. An example will make this more clear.

You said to me yesterday, " I should be very careful when I ride my motorcycle in the National Parks. "

This looks like:

You said to me yesterday, "I should be very careful when I ride my motorcycle in the National Parks."

You can also use these 3 prior tags inside the quotation tag.

You said to me yesterday, "I should be very careful when I ride my motorcycle in the National Parks."

F) Hyperlinking

You can hyperlink to a destination easily using some html codes.

Let's hyperlink to the main page of this forum.

I want to go to [url=""]EnglishForward.com site

I want to go to EnglishForward.com site[/url]

The spacing above is tricky. You need to

1) eliminate the spaces a) after "<" in all instances, and b) before ">" in all instances.
2) leave a space as shown here "a href=" (note the space between 'a' and 'href=')
3) quote the URL tag as shown here "" (quotes should be included)

If you are unsure of yourself as your create your first hyperlink tag, go ahead and try, and then hit the "preview" button before posting. You can try the link in the preview window to see if it works.

Summary

There a lot of html tags that exist. Not all the html tags, however, appear to work with posting messages in this forum. I have given you some of the more commonly used tags.

I hope you find this information helpful in creating your posts. Don't feel that you must use these tags, but they are there if you want to use them.

If someone finds a typo(s), post a correction and I will edit the original.

Hope this helps.