Tech – HTML Primer Two

I previously made another HTML guide, which started on some basics. I’ll(finally) be adding on to that with a few more basic bits you can use to format entries. I’m not the type to go into means of totally remaking how your diary looks, as another diarist does. Personally, I tend to stray from that sort of stuff. This is focused toward general format of entries.

One thing is the desire to change text size. There are a few ways to do this, but I’m going to focus on the easiest and cleanest for now. Using the FONT tag is one, but its simple to simply use heading tags.

Heading tags are formatted like this: <H1></H1>

The numeral defines the level of the header, from 1 to 6. The last few levels are actually smaller than normal sized text, but they also make the text bold, so there an effect to using them. Lets have a look at the levels, shall we?

Header Level One
Header Level Two
Header Level Three
Header Level Four
Header Level Five
Header Level Six

As you can see, each header gets successively smaller as the level increases. That way you can, for the sake of organization, have your text at a set scale, using different header tags for different levels of headers.

Also, you can define the alignment of a header from within the tags. Just what does that mean? I’ll show you. Note how the above headers were centered? That’s because I declared their alignment inside of the first tag. Here’s how you do it:

Inside of the first tag, you place ALIGN=CENTER. Or you can substitute LEFT, RIGHT or JUSTIFY for CENTER. That way you can cleanly position your header. Hope that’s clear, I’m still new to explaining things. 🙂

Two more sets of tags that are useful for formatting are Subscript and Superscript. I’s much easier to show you than to detail it in explanation, so here we go!

Subscript: 2223444 – The ‘3’ is subscript.
Superscript 5556777 – The ‘6’ is superscript.

These two are useful for formatting text of mathematical equations. For example, using superscript to do exponents. Two to the third power: 23. These tags are pretty simple as well.

Subscript: <SUB></SUB>
Superscript: <SUP></SUP>

Another useful toy is the breakpoint tag. It’s real simple. <BR>

This is especially useful here and I’ll explain why. Here on OD, when you save an entry, all lines are surrounded by paragraph tags, which is why lines will appear double spaced, even if you enter them one right below the other. So if you want to make a few lines(that aren’t part of the same paragraph) you have to use a breakpoint tag. But lets go to the example.

Lets say you want the below.

First Line
Second Line

If you just put them in one over the other, you get the below.

First Line

Second Line

If you want them to be one right below the other, you have to enter them as shown:

First Line<BR>Second Line

You see, you place them on the same line, with a <BR>, which will start a new line with whatever is after it. Simple in execution, hard to explain simply. For me at least. 😉

Do you want to center some text you just wrote? When it comes to situations like a block of plain text, there’s a separate set of tags to handle positioning of text. The most important being <CENTER></CENTER>. Surround text with these two and it will be centered.

Example:

Centered Text

<CENTER>Centered Text</CENTER>

Now, one thing I do often is stack breakpoints inside of centered text. Mostly with my pics at the end of my news entries. You can surround text peppered with other tags, but you have to be sure of one thing when mixing tags. If you surround a block of text with paird tags(like center, bold, italics, superscript and others), you have to put the ending tags on in reverse order of the opening tags.

Ok, that wasn’t clear. Lets put it this way. When I make my links, I use a link tag <A> and a font tag to color it. <FONT>. I put in the link opening tag first, then the font opening tag. Therefore, when I put the close tags(</A> and </Font>), I have to put the font closing tag first, then the link closing tag, reversing the order of the openers. As much as HTML can be forgiving, there are places where its a stickler. Order of tags is one.

Alright, that’s this time period’s installment of basic HTML help by Ren. If there are any questions, note me and I’ll look into clarifying things. 🙂