I'd like to suggest for folks that aren't HTML experts, that if you're using Firefox, you can download an Add-on called "Write Area". What it will do is allow you to have a WYSIWYG HTML editor available in any text box on your screen. You can download it from Mozilla's Add-on site. Search for "Write area".
Once you have it installed it works like this:
When you click "reply" to a message, you get a blank box where you would normally put your HTML for your reply. Instead of just typing away, click your right mouse button within the text box. You should then see a menu item called "edit in a Write Area". Select that. Now type anything you want. It has all the normal editor functions built in for things like Bold, Italics, and underline, and it works just like any other text editor. You'll notice it has other things too, like unsertiing 'special' characters that aren't normally on your keyboard, like ® or §.
If you click the "source" button, you'll see the html that will be produced when you save. It has buttons for adding links, images, and even flash (yuck) and javascript.
Rather than just typing, if you have a webpage that you'd like to copy text from, just copy that text directly from the webpage (you might have to be careful about some of the formatting from the page, but you will get the hang of it with a little practice). When you paste it into your WriteArea, you'll see that it maintains all the formatting! There is a button to remove formatting which is especially useful if what you paste in has some really weird text blocks, that you don't want.
Once you're all done, click the 'save' icon, and you'll see that your text box now has all the HTML markup to properly display the text you'd entered. Hit FR's 'preview' button and make sure it's going to display as you like it. IF you need to change things, after you've already exited 'text area', but before you Post, you can just right-click the text box again, and edit your changes.
Hope this is useful for some folks. I've been doing HTML for a long time, and I find Write Area creates nice clean HTML without a lot of work.
Below is a screen shot of what Write Area looked like while I was editing this post...
Enjoy!
