June 11, 2007

HTML at ROS

HTML tags that work on ROS:

i: italic

b: bold

u: underline

(I’ve yet to figure out which other HTML tags are supported here on ROS, and the lack of a Preview feature makes experimentation risky and difficult.)

John Navas, in a frustrated comment to our May 4, 2007 pitch thread.

Experiment no longer! Here’s a guide to help you boldly, emphatically, and verifiably go wild in the ROS comment threads.

HTML tags help you format the text in your comments to make your words appear bold, italicized, underlined, or linked; or to make long quotes appear in pretty blue boxes. The tags are fairly straightforward. Every tag needs to be opened to signal the place that you want formatting to start and closed to signal the place where you want formatting to end. Closing your tags is especially important — if you don’t, you’ll wreak some minor havoc on the threads, but we’ll get to that later.

All HTML tags look and act the same, so maybe it’s best to teach by example.

To italicize something, just put it between a and a .

So Moby Dick in HTML looks like Moby Dick on the page.

To bold something, put it between and a .

So the HTML code Herman Melville gives you Herman Melville.

Underlining follows the same rules, but with a and a : Everything inside here will be underlined.

For our blue-boxed “blockquotes,” put the word blockquote in those same brackets:

<blockquote>I feel so blue and boxed in.</blockquote> gives you:

I feel so blue and boxed in.

Embedded links are a little trickier, but not by much: <a href=”URL of the page you want to link to”>text that will show up as linked</a>

Got it?

Also, for the record, we agree that a site without a preview function or editable comments is like a night without stars. Editable comments will be one of the first additions to the new site. We’ll make every comment editable until someone has responded to it directly. Perfect, right? I wanted to kiss our developer team — all of them — right on the mouth when I heard that was an option.

Last word: if you remember nothing else, please please remember to close your HTML tags. When you forget, the code spills over, turning the rest of the comment thread into one giant blockquote, or one big bolded mess. If you ever do forget to close a HTML tag, send an email to everyone radioopensource org [turn it into an email address] and we’ll go in and fix it.

Try your hand at HTML below. Please practice here until you get the hang of it — it’s not too hard for us to go in and fix HTML flubs in other comment threads, but we’re is prone to grumble if we have to do it too much.