Ever wanted to know how to do that thing where your text is green instead of black,
and bold or italic or underlined instead of plain, or a nice little sans serif
instead of the standard Times New Roman?
That's HTML, folks, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language,
and is essentially the stuff the world wide web is made out of. It's a set of
'tags', which are codes which tell your computer how to display stuff. Without
HTML, your text looks like whatever your default settings are. With HTML, the
world (almost!) is your oyster.
You can...
- Post images
- Link things
- Change your font face
- Change your text to bold, italics or a combination thereof
- Change the size of your text
A pretty simple example of HTML is turning this:
into this
*she wanders into the main hall, casting a
cautious glance around... etc*
Hello?
*she calls*
Okay! Now you know what you can do with it, you want to know how to do it?
The HTML tag for the post above would look like this:
<font face="verdana" color="red" size=2><b>*bold text</b>
*not bold text* <b>*more bold text*</b></font>
If this makes sense to you, head straight on to My RP HTML Quick Reference
otherwise, Shayanna has a very good basic HTML tutorial here; I advise
you read this first to learn the basics of HTML. I'll just fill in some blanks.
HTML don'ts There are some HTML tags and ways of doing things listed
on Shay's page that most chatters would probably prefer you didn't do. The most
commonly-irritating one is creating big handle or post text using <font size> or
<H> tags. Do not use font sizes bigger than 4 for long periods of time or
you WILL be ignored and/or yelled at.
On the same note, don't make it too small or nobody will read it. Always
test your HTML before you use it so you make sure it will turn up correctly.
Other things that irritate people are using tables in a roleplay post (it's a bit pointlessly elaborate)
and using too many horizontal rules. They look pretty- the first time. Don't overdo it.
The best way to learn to use HTML effectively in the chatroom and on the
message board is to practise. If you're not confident, a great way to learn
is to click yourself on PM (see the chat page) and
type the HTML in the 'whisper' box so that only you can see it until you perfect it.
My RP HTML Quick Reference