Now that you know the basic format, you are ready to make your post. But how
is it going to look? Will it be written in bold or italics? Will it be red or green or
yellow?
To help you make your decisions, here is a brief summary of effects you can make,
and the HTML tags that let you get the effect you want.
bold. Say you have decided that the key word in your complaint is
'grossed' and you want to make it bold. The tag set you are
going to need is the '<b>...</b>' pair, and it is used like this:
Your body hair talk has totally <b>grossed</b> me out!
When you view this with your browser, the effect will be this:
Your body hair talk has totally grossed me out!
italic. Bold is not enough? It needs more emphasis? Try the italic tag. This
one comes in the pair
'<i>...</i>', and it is used like this:
Your body hair talk has totally <i>grossed</i> me out!
The effect on your browser will now look like this:
Your body hair talk has totally grossed me out!
To use it in combination with the bold tag, use the following format:
Your body hair talk has totally <b><i>grossed</i></b> me out!
Which will give you this result:
Your body hair talk has totally grossed me out!
Please make it a policy to respect the order of your tags. In other words, close the tag that you
used most recently
first, then work outwards. Otherwise it's easy to get confused!
underline. Now, say you want to use an underline to really let the gURLs know how you feel. The tag you need
to do this is the pair '<u>...</u>'. You might choose to use it like this:
you've gone too far!
How does this look in HTML? Like this:
you've gone <u>too far</u>!
strikethrough. Underlining the text still did not satisfy you? Want to strike a line
through it too?
No problem, the '<s>...</s>' pair of HTML tags is here for you. In HTML it is used
like this:
you've gone <s>too far</s>!
And the effect looks like this:
you've gone too far!
Combined with the underline, then you have:
you've gone too far!
font size. Now maybe you decide to play with the size of your shoutout. You
can do this with the font size tag, which lets you make text bigger or smaller. The tag set
looks like this: '<font size="+1">...</font>', where the "+1" indicates how many points
larger than the standard font you want your text to look. You can also make this number
negative if you want to, which will make the text smaller. Here are
some examples:
This text is one size bigger than the standard.
This text is two sizes bigger than the standard.
This text is three sizes bigger than the standard.
This text is one size smaller than the standard.
How might you change the font size on your posting? Maybe like this:
you've gone <font size="+3">too</font> far!
What is the result? It looks like this:
you've gone too far!
font color. Color is especially fun to play with. On your average browser
(Netscape and MS Explorer included), you are provided with a range of different colors to do with what you like.
There are two ways of telling a browser what color you want to use. One way is kind of tricky because it
makes use of a very scary-looking numbering system that is called hexadecimal. It's handy though because it gives you a lot of different colors to choose from and works on many different browsers. The other way
is a little simpler because it lets you use regular English words for colors.
But it might not work on browsers in Thailand. And it gives you only 16 colors to choose from--that's it.
So if you've napped this afternoon and feel fresh,
rosy and up to learning the nuts and bolts of a scary numbering system,
take a peek at some hexadecimal. Otherwise,
keep reading here and we'll walk you through the simpler way. You
can always check out the harder way another time.
Netscape and Internet Explorer let you specify colors in your HTML by using English words
like "blue", "yellow" or "green." They also let you specify some sort of obscure colors like "aqua" and
"maroon," plus maybe 10 or 12 others.
You put them in your HTML code like this:
Dear <font color="blue">gURL</font>:
for a result that looks:
Dear gURL:
like this.
Be careful though! There are only 16 named colors that broswers will recognize,
which, for the most part, are the pretty obvious ones (blue, green, yellow, etc.). So don't get too
attached to the idea of seeing your text in some really specific shade of alizarin crimson.
That is, unless you're willing to brave the hexidecimal...
For a complete list of the named colors in HTML, see our
color table.
blink. One particularly annoying tag is the blink tag, which only works on Netscape browsers. It looks like this:
This text (if you're using Netscape).
To make this effect yourself, use the <blink>...</blink> set of tags, like so:
This text <blink>blinks</blink> (if you're using Netscape).
(We suggest using this tag sparingly...)
marquee. Internet Explorer has a feature that works somewhat like the blink
tag, but is a little more dynamic. This is called the Marquee tag. Marquees are exciting; the effect is that your text moves slowly across the screen from right to left. If you are using Internet Explorer,
the effect will look like this:
Otherwise it will look like plain, ordinary
text.
The Marquee tag also gives you a certain amount of control over how
fast your text moves, what direction it moves in, etc.
The tag set looks like this: <MARQUEE>.....</MARQUEE>, and it is implemented like
this:
<MARQUEE>a message to gURL</MARQUEE>
If now you decide that you want your text to move from left to right and then right to
left, you can make it happen by modifying your tag so it looks like this:
<MARQUEE BEHAVIOR="ALTERNATE">A message to gURL</MARQUEE>
Which provides this result:
font face. But wait, there's more. Say you decide that you don't like the
style of font on your browser at all, and would
much rather type out your note to gURL in something a little more expressive. You have a lot
of different fonts to choose from on a word processor, so why not on a browser?
To specify a font that you would like to use, you have to
use the font face tag. When used, it looks like this:
<FONT FACE="Arial">Dear gURL</FONT>
Where "Arial" is the name of the font that you like.
You should keep in mind, however, that not all browsers have access to all fonts.
There are some standard fonts that are put on most computers, and which come with them
when you buy them. These include: Arial, Courier, Times Roman, Helvetica, Algerian and a few others. Here are examples of some
pretty standard fonts:
Dear gURL
This font is Arial.
Dear gURL
This font is Courier.
Dear gURL
This font is Helvetica.
For a somewhat more complete listing of font faces that you can use to embellish your
shoutout, check out http://www.webdiner.com/annexe/font/font.htm.
It also gives you some idea of what the fonts look like when you use them.
