Seems like a good 80% of the sandbox was dedicated to tables. Does anyone ever even use tables in HTML? In all the years on FR, I don’t think I have ever come across a post where a FReeper used a table, nevermind used colored cell spacing within the table with the right justified text and a cell border with a different color still, with an odd number of columns.
Thanks!
And A Happy & Healthy 2013!
Ping HTML 2013
w3schools.com for a HTML tutorial and a bunch of other stuff.
Links aren’t difficult, but you do need to take care . . . I recommend that the newbie always preview a link and open the link in a separate window, in order to verify that indeed it takes the reader where you intend.A fine point: if you want the link you’re making to take the reader to a specific reply in a thread, you can determine the URL for that purpose by navigating to that reply and clicking on the reply number. This will position the start of the reply at the top of your screen, and the URL which navigated you there will appear in your browser’s URL window.
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!
<DT> term </DT> <DD> meaning </DD> <DT> next term </DT> <DD> meaning </DD> </DD> </DL>
IMHO the definition list is underutilized. I like to add underlining and/or boldface to emphasize the term I am defining or describing:definition lists:
- term
- meaning or description. I like the effect, especially when the description is wordy enough that it runs to multiple lines, as I'm deliberately causing now with this bit of "filibustering." I don't know any other way to get this effect.
- next term
- meaning
<DT> term </DT> <DD> meaning </DD> <DT> next term </DT> <DD> meaning </DD> </DD> </DL>
IMHO the definition list is underutilized. I like to add underlining and/or boldface to emphasize the term I am defining or describing:definition lists:
- term
- meaning or description. I like the effect, especially when the description is wordy enough that it runs to multiple lines, as I'm deliberately causing now with this bit of "filibustering." I don't know any other way to get this effect.
- next term
- meaning
<DT> term </DT> <DD> meaning </DD> <DT> next term </DT> <DD> meaning </DD> </DD> </DL>
IMHO the definition list is underutilized. I like to add underlining and/or boldface to emphasize the term I am defining or describing:definition lists:
- term
- meaning or description. I like the effect, especially when the description is wordy enough that it runs to multiple lines, as I'm deliberately causing now with this bit of "filibustering." I don't know any other way to get this effect.
- next term
- meaning
Do we really want more freepers to know how to post a picture of Helen Thomas?
I feel like we have just been exposed to the honest mistake of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
How do you do accents on letters?
...
Good review. I was thinking this morning about looking up one of these tags.
BOOKbookBUMP
<pre> ... </pre>
This pair forces browsers to temporarily use a "fixed font", and preserves spaces. That is extremely helpful to rapidly create a simple table so columns don't get fussed up, since nearly all "reply boxes", such as FR, use fixed font. This gives a WYSIWYG situation without using the complex table formatting in HTML and is useful for simple tabular information.
Example columns for pre:
State Abbr. Wind Temperature New York NY windy cold Penn PA " cold Florida FL hurricanes nice Illinois Il calm warm
This is what it would have looked like without using pre./pre:
State Abbr. Wind Temperature
New York NY windy cold
Penn PA " cold
Florida FL hurricanes nice
Illinois Il calm warm
Psst...over hear.
Updated ping