How did you type the tags and the phrase for posting a picture here without adding extra spaces to keep it showing?
Here's how I do it. Yype the and symbol then #60; (no spaces) for the left facing one, The right uses #62 instead.
Alternately use the and symbol then lt; for the left and gt; for the right.
Example: <img src="URL Here">. You may have to avoid spell check when using these methods.
For reference see:
Free Republic 2011 HTML Sandbox (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2650195/posts)
http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm
You type the standard escape code in place of the character you want to show. The escape codes are known as HTML character entities — click the link for a list. In the case of the less-than symbol that starts HTML markup elements, the entity is <. (Note that, in order to show that escape code properly, I needed to escape the ampersand using its entity, which is &.)
Firefox provides a simple way to view the markup used to create a given part of a page. Simply use the mouse to select the area of interest. Then right-click and select View Selection Source. That will show you the markup that was used, which for FR pages is pretty much all you need.
If you want to dig into more advanced cases, I recommend the Firebug extension. With Firebug installed, there will also be an Inspect Element selection in the right-click menu. It will show you the markup in the context of the overall structure of the page. Three separate but related computer languages are used to create modern pages: HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript. HTML structures the content of the page. CSS provides separate styling attributes to be applied to the various page elements. And JavaScript can be used to generate and rearrange the HTML and CSS and react to user actions and even changing conditions back at the server. Firebug lets you dig into all of that.
But FR disables CSS and JavaScript for posting, so just very basic HTML knowledge is all you really need.