Understanding how HTML works

Now that we have seen how bulletin board code wraps tags around strings of text to format it, let's talk a little bit about HTML.

This HTML lesson will show you how to format a little HTML in blogs like this one and blog comments.

After you start to learn HTML, you will start seeing it popping up all over the web in odd little corners.

There are plenty of places on the web where you may want or need to format a little bit of text using HTML code rather than bulletin board code, places like blog comments (where it may say something like "HTML ok" as a caption to the little window, and you may see other commenters with bold, italic, or quote sections in their comments.

You also would use it in most blogs, like this one and in Wordpress.

Make a section bold in an HTML blog or comment like this: <bold>

Make a section italic in an HTML blog or comment like this: <italic>

Put quotes in a separate section:

<blockquote>This is the section I want to quote from another source. How it will look depends on whether it is permitted and how the formatting is set up. Some comments do not permit blockquotes. Sometimes the formatting is set so you can barely see the difference.</blockquote>

Looks like this in this blog:

This is the section I want to quote from another source. How it will look depends on whether it is permitted and how the formatting is set up. Some comments do not permit blockquotes. Sometimes the formatting is set so you can barely see the difference.

Don't be surprised if after you type one thing in a blog and save it, it ends up looking like you wanted, but the code looks completely different. Most blog types have HTML converters that will take several different types of code (there's more than one way of formatting) and make them all into one system. Sometimes this works, but sometimes it seems like the smarter they make these little text editors, the more dumb choices they make.

Try that and see how it looks in blog comments.