HTML Help

You don't need to add any HTML markup to create your personal web page, but you can if you like. It is beyond the scope of this web site to tutor you on HTML markup, but here are a few basic tips and pointers should you want to "spruce it up" a bit. For extended markup information, search the internet for HTML Tutorials.

PLEASE NOTE: This site uses Cascading Style Sheets for presentation and design. The <FONT> tags developed with HTML 2.0+ have been known to cause conflicts with style sheet markup. It is highly recommended you refrain from use of the <FONT> tag in any way and use the style sheets as described below.

Please note that the only fields that will accept HTML markup on this website are the profile field on the Edit Member Info form and the description field on the Add or Edit Listing forms. HTML will be ignored for all other fields to maintain site consistency. Both of the above fields, however, constitute the majority of your web page or listing content.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a plain text file with special markers, called tags, to tell the browser to format the text in a particular manner. There are two basic types of tags, "free-standing" and "container" tags. We will only cover some of the basic container tags in this short help file.

The HTML markup tags are constructed by the less than/greater than characters < and >. the text that goes between them is fairly intuitive; STRONG or strong stands for bold, EM for italic, u for underline, and so on. Container tags require a beginning (<STRONG>) and closing (</STRONG>) tag; free-standing tags do not. The ending tag has a forward slash in it to denote where the special markup is to stop.

Bold Text: Place a beginning and ending STRONG tag around the text you want to bold.

<STRONG>This</STRONG> produces This.

Italic Text (emphasis): Place a beginning and ending EM tag around the text you want to italicize.

<EM>This</EM> produces This.

Text Size: This site has simple styles already set up to assign the fonts and colors that would best go with the site. These are set up in "classes," so that all you need to do is assign the class:
<SPAN class="red">this</span> produces this



See a full list of the current styles here.

If you don't see anything you like, you can always use the SPAN object to assign whatever style and color you want:

<SPAN STYLE="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 22px; color: FF00FF; font-weight: 700; font-style; italic;">This</span>
produces
This

Lists: Lists come in two basic types: Ordered lists (<OL>) and unordered (<UL>) lists. Unordered lists itemize with bullets and ordered lists use numbers. The list is a nested structure; the overall list has a beginning and ending list tag, and the list items themselves each have their own list tags:

This <OL>     <LI>one</LI>     <LI>two</LI>     <LI>three</LI> </OL>

. . . and this <UL>     <LI>one</LI>     <LI>two</LI>     <LI>three</LI> </UL>

Produces this one two three

. . . and this. one two three

Free-standing tags: Briefly, the most common free-standing tags are the rule and break tag and require no closing tag because they are a whole unit on their own:

<BR> - produces an extra line space or "carriage return," and
<HR width="400" size="6" align="center"> - produces a rule, 400 pixels wide, 6 pixels thick, and aligned in the center of whatever space it is placed. The width can be specified in pixels or as a percentage of the available space. Valid alignment values are left, center, right, or eliminate the ALIGN attribute altogether and the rule will align left (or center, if it's width is set for 100% of the available space.)

Entities: You will have to use entities, the HTML equivalent of some special characters, from time to time. Entitles are special "words" to manage special and reserved characters beyond letters and numbers. Note in the above examples, the values for the tag attributes are quoted. This is often important so the browser can separate the values from the rest of the tag, and from what you intend to be text. Sometimes if your text contains quotes, the browser will "see" the text within the quotes as an attribute of a nearby tag, making the entire block of text disappear! For this reason, you should always try to use entities for quotes and ampersands. Entities can also represent other special characters not on your keyboard:
& - Ampersand - &amp; (Note that all entities begin with an ampersand and end with a semicolon. This is like the HTML markup tag and denotes the special character of the entity.)
" - Quotation - &quot; Most important to remember, use this one if you use nothing else! We don't know what happened to the "e" at the end of quot, but this is the correct entity for a quotation mark.
™ - Trademark - &trade;
© - Copyright - &copy;
® - Registered Trademark - &reg;

Click here for a full list of HTML entities.

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