So you wanna be able to speak in style in the chatrooms!
**IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU PUT IN THE END TAGS!!!!** The tag is the part inside the <pointy brackets> and the ending tag is the part that has the slash (/) in it. If you don't have that, all of the rest of the text on the page will continue to be of that changed style and people will yell at you! LOUDLY!!!!
One thing that I should mention here is that there are some alternate commands that work with many browsers, but not all! They are simpler to type and easier to remember, but to be safe, the standard HTML commands are given above. But just in case you want to try (which I do lots of times, and it usually works), you can use these alternate commands for bold and italics:
Now you can mix those up, as well, but you have to be careful of the order in which you put them or else the text style will continue. For example, if you want something bolded and italicized, it would be like this:
See how the tags look? They have to be in the near-same place on either end of the text, so if the bold tag is first, it has to be last. If the italics tag is second, it has to be second-last, and so on. Think of the tags as different brackets and braces in mathematics. They have to match up. You can't have [(2+2]). See how the brackets are reversed? It has to be [(2+2)]
You can change the font size. The text can be up to 4 sizes bigger and 2 sizes smaller. You can also change the color of the fonts to 256 different colors. It helps to know the hexadecimal color codes. You can click HERE for a good colorchart of hexadecimal numbers. You can also just experiment with the color words and see what you get: red, blue, green, yellow, purple... etc. But don't do white! To do this, you start with the <font... tag, but more stuff can go inside. To change the font to 2 sizes bigger, it goes like this:
If you want to change the style of font that people are looking at, we'll use the font FACE switch. To change to Arial font:
To change the color of your text to red:
To make your font 2 sizes bigger AND red:
NOTE: If you use two separate font commands like this:
....notice how you have to put 2 separate closing tags! You need one closing tag for each item enclosed in <brackets>!
Now, to get complicated, suppose you want it to be red, 2 sizes smaller this time, underlined, blinking and Comic Sans MS font:
And that is that!
You should practice your new skills where they do not annoy other chatters! (Plus, this is the way you'd write a web page from scratch using merely your notepad!) So before you try them in a chat room:
Now save it, but when you do, click on the bar at the bottom so it shows all file types. Then save it with a .html extension. So if you called your file test, you would type in test.html and then save that. Now start NetScape, click on the File menu, then Open file. Then find where you saved it and open it up. NetScape will show you how your text will look!
If you want to try your hand at building web pages from scratch, (It's not that scary, really!) just do what's outlined above, plus a few more commands:
Sidenote: If you want to add blank lines in your text, you have to "program" them in. You can't just hit the enter key a bunch of times while you're typing it because html is a markup language, not a WYSIWYG language. To add a blank line, do a <P>. The P stands for "P"aragraph. It gives you a blank line like you would find in block style typing.
Also, to make a hard line break, you type <br> for the line break.
Another nifty thing you can do is to post links to other places or pics on the web! To do this, you simply type:
Got it?
Good!
Don't forget to practice and
CLOSE THOSE TAGS!!!!
(All of this hoopla began because I wanted to be able to talk "prettily" in the chat room at CEA, like my friend FALCON! He taught me my first HTML lesson, how to write in my signature blue! FALCON is always there to provide assistance and answer my questions about 'puter stuff! He was my first and best teacher on the net! Thanx, J! *hug*)