Posted on 05/31/2008 9:09:38 PM PDT by sig226
It's time for a new HTML reference so you can make your posts look cool.
HTML means Hyper Text Markup Language. It's a set of simple commands used to format the text of your posts, add images, or links, or change the appearance.
URL is Uniform Resource Locator. It's the name of the page or the picture that you see, the www.http:// stuff. You'll need to use the URL to make links and post pictures.
Quotation Marks Quotes have to be used around the URLs for web pages and images on Free Republic. Some systems do not require this. Ours does.
Once the Free Republic software detects an HTML tag in your post, it will assume the entire thing was written for HTML. This means it will eliminate paragraphs and line breaks that you used to clarify your writing. In order to prevent that, I'll start with the two simplest tags, <br> and <p>. When you use html tags, they disappear when the post is pasted to the board, so don't worry if they look funny or if your post seems to run on.
This is the break tag. <br>
It tells the computer to end the line and start a new one. <br>
Just type it where you want the line to end. <br>
This is the paragraph tag. <p>
It tells the computer to end the line, insert a blank one, then start a new line.
The rest of the tags have to be used with an on tag and an off tag. This is simple enough. One of the most commonly used tags is the italic tag <i>. This tag turns the italics on. When you want the italics to end, turn them off by using the forward slash with the appropriate command, in this case, </i>.
Commonly used tags:
<p> paragraph
<br> line break
These tags are not used in pairs.
Commonly used pairs:
<i> </i>italics
<b> </b>bold characters
<u> </u>underline
<font color = red>This makes the font red.</font color = red> Orange,blue,green,purple,and yellow also work.
<center> </center>
Headline fonts
Headlines add emphasis to an important point.
You can use 1,2,3,4, or 5. The tags automatically insert a blank line between the headline and your next paragraph.
Sarcasm tag
</sarc> This is the sarcasm tag. It is not a real HTML tag. It is used to mark your witty repartee so that everyone will know you are making a funny. Type an ampersand - & then lt; then /sarc. An & and gt makes the other carat >.
How to create a link:
<a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/home.htm">www.Free Republic.com</a>
A means anchor. H ref means horizontal reference. It's called horizontal because the computer is going across the web to a different page. There are also vertical links that can go to specific points on the same page. What comes after the a href= is where the computer will go. The horizontal reference is the complete URL of the page you want to link. It's in the navigation bar at the top of your web browser. Highlight it and copy it. Make sure you get all of it. Some URLs are surprisingly long, and if you miss some of the URL, the link might not work.
You can type anything between the <a href=></a> parts.
www.Free Republic.com
Click here.
abc12345
All of these links go to the same page, I just typed different things between <a href=></a> tags.
How to add images to your post:
<img src=></img>
The img tags tell the computer to find and insert a picture.
These tags insert this wonderful image from Rush Limbaugh's website:
<img src="http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_062807/content/01125113.Par.4584.ImageFile.jpg""height=218""width=285"></img>
You need to know the URL of the picture to do this. You can see the picture's URL when you put your cursor on the picture and right click the mouse. You see a small box with "properties" at the bottom. Left click on "properties" and you get a dialog box with the image URL and dimensions. It says Address: next to the URL, with (URL) underneath. Copy the URL and paste it after your img src= tag. Make sure you get all of the URL for the picture. There isn't a lot of space for the URL and sometimes they are very long. The image Size and Dimensions are beneath the URL. Free Republic allocates memory for each image, and if it doesn't know the dimensions of the image, it will allocate more memory than needed. It tells you the width, then the height of the picture. You don't have to tell the computer that the height of that image was 218 and the width was 285, but it saves memory and memory costs money.
This is called a hotlink. The picture is actually on another computer, but we see it here. This causes the other computer to use it's memory and machinery to provide the image. Some sites prevent it, or object to it. You can't hotlink an image from any of Yahoo's GeoCities pages, for example. Yahoo prevents it.
Do Not Cut And Paste List.
Some websites have forbidden us to copy and paste their material, including images. There have been lawsuits over this. The software will mostly prevent you from using the material that has been blocked, but not always. There are also some image sources that are not allowed on the list. Please don't use them. Lawsuits suck.
Link to the Do Not Cut And Paste List
Thank you.
~ Bookmark ~
.
Use the carats, under the K and L keys. The square brackets work on certain boards formatted for UBB code. Universal Bulletin Board code is an abbreviated version of HTML, a little easier to use, but it has limits and requires more software to operate it. It won’t work here.
<img src="http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_062807/content/01125113.Par.4584.ImageFile.jpg""height=218""width=285"></img>There is a slight error in the explanation of the img tag. The img tag is an empty tag, so it does not take a closing tag. The </img> is an error. Also the quoting of height and width attributes is wrong.
The correct mark up for HTML is: <img src="http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_062807/content/01125113.Par.4584.ImageFile.jpg" height="218" width="285">
The correct mark up for XHTML is:<img src="http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_062807/content/01125113.Par.4584.ImageFile.jpg" height="218" width="285" />
It works on this board, but I’ve had to close the img tag on some others. But it is interesting that in all the HTML books and websites I’ve read, none of them mentioned that the img tag can work without closing it. Thanks.
Here is the specification from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on the image tag:
The img element is a void element. An img element must have a start tag but must not have an end tag.The World Wide Web Consortium is the organization that develops the web standards. The director of W3C is Tim Berners-Lee who invented of the World Wide Web.
Newbies are always asking how to post images. This is difficult for them. Putting a closing tag for the image tag just complicates things unnecessarily for them. Besides, a closing image tag is just plain a mistake.
Also the quoting is wrong in the example on FR. As is, the quotes are around the attributes. Instead the pair of quotes needs to surround only the value of the attribute after the = sign. Here is the sample on FR:
"height=218""width=285"The opening quote of each pair of quotes needs to be moved to just after the = sign as in the following:
height="218" width="285"I think the the least FR could do is give newbies the correct web standard and syntax of HTML.
Now it's even more interesting. I've been closing the img tag for years and the internet hasn't blown up. I must have been doing it wrong.
Well, you have not been following the HTML specification. I have been using HTML since 1995, and I have never used a closing tag for the img tag because it is an empty tag. There has never been a closing tag in the HTML specification for the img tag. That is true of some other tags as well such as the break <br> tag and the <meta> tag.
So what does a web browser like Internet Explorer do when you put in an ending tag that is not part of the HTML specification? Most likely, it will ignore it because that tag is not providing any useful information.
There are other tags like the paragraph tag <p> that require a closing tag </p>, but many authors leave it out. So what does the browser do? It infers from the next opening <p> tag that the previous paragraph should be closed.
My point is this: the HTML sandbox is for newbies. Why complicate things for them by showing a closing img tag that is not part of the HTML specification and certainly not required?
If you want to do extra work by writing an unnecessary closing tag, I think you should continue doing so. But I don't think you should burden a newbie with that.
b ttt for 2009
BTTT
Is it easier to use
I typed in < marquee > to start & < / marquee > to end the HTML (WITHOUT spaces, of course), which I thought FR's HTML Bootcamp said was the right way.
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