Posted on 09/20/2010 11:32:29 AM PDT by ShadowAce
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
Favorites, thank you.
Usually after ten people yelled at you instead of closing it.
Italians be gone!
Speaking of which, what happened to the blinking tag function?
I defer to you to post that one.... :)
THANKS TONS.
1. I put the copyright list in Word in 3 columns and printed for easy ref.
2. The last month or so, “navy” as color can end up green when other colors are put below it. I have to use “000066” to get it to stay navy. I have no idea why.
3. I understand that fonts are a function of one’s browser and settings etc. However, clearly some of the Word fonts work and some do not even in IE8 . . . I don’t know about Firefox, I haven’t dinked around much with fonts and Firefox.
4. If anyone has a list of viable easy to read fonts that also have some uniqueness—that work on FR with IE8, I’d be thrilled to have such a list. Have gone through all the Word fonts I was interested and laboriouisly tried them on FR in IE8 . . . a small percentage worked. And now I’ve misplaced that list. Silly me.
Try the View Source command for items you are having trouble accomplishing.
Right click on any page that has an image posting done in a manner you wish to duplicate. Or for that matter, has any formatting you wish to try and learn.
One of the choices after right clicking is "View Source" which will open a page of text code for that HTML page on your web browser -- in other words, how that page and its code comes across in plain text with the HTML flags.
From post numbers you can (with some study) find your way to the exact image or effect and see the actual code used. Copy and past that code to a notepad or word file for plain text and then modify it for the URL picture you want to post a link to.
Be sure to include the quotes and also to remember that a picture you have on your computer can't be shown -- it must be posted to the web by you or someone else to have a URL address that can be accessed.
It would be great if you’d put the primer up on
TABLES
as well as colored borders for tables
. . .
as well as background colors with some attention as to easy on the eyes colors for backgrounds. Supposedly some research suggests that dark backgrounds and light text is physiologically easier and less tiring on the eyes. That’s why the founders of ATS (AboveTopSecret.com) use black background and grey text as their default. May be but I still like light background and black or navy text. LOL.
If you do the tables primer . . . it would be nice to also know how to size the tables and pair them so that a left side, e.g. which has a bigger paragraph is still kept next to a right side which has a short paragraph in some sort of reasonable proportion—if I’m making sense.
Thank you!
bump
Good idea. I will look into that when I get home from work this evening—unless some other FReeper gets to it first.
Thanks for the helpful summary.
It would be helpful if you could describe how to include tables.
ping
Posts #34 and #37. Thanks for the idea.
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