This board recognizes a very limited amount of HTML coding for text formatting purposes. Since several of us have had trouble determining what does and does not work, this thread is being created to list and explain anything that has been found to work.
All the coding that has worked thus far has been bracket code; ampersand code also works, but I have not tested much of it. Bracket code means that the commands must be surrounded by the less than symbol (<) before and the greater than symbol (>) after the command. Ampersand code is used in HTML to produce characters which are used functionally for code in HTML, such as the less than and greater than characters and the ampersand itself, as well as non-keyboard characters such as trademark symbols, and a few other entries.
The standard b, i, and u codes do not work. Instead, the older em and /em instruction will produce italic, and the strong and /strong will produce bold. Links are not underlined, but are a different color.
Text may be offset/indented using blockquote and /blockquote. The system does not provide the location of the original. Offsetting may also be created with lists. An unnumbered list uses ul before and /ul after, but each item listed must be introduced with li and concluded with /li. This will create dots in front of each item; without the li /li markings, the list will have no dots and breaks will have to be made manually. Numbered lists can be created with ol and /ol, and also require the li and /li markings for each entry including the first. Usually in HTML code one can include the delimiter start= and a number within the ol command bracket (a space before start) to begin the count on a different number, and step= with a number to run the count by something other than increments of one (including using -1 to have it count backwards from the start number), but I have not had any reason to attempt any of these things here (and am surprised I remembered them, having used them so rarely anyway).
You can also use code and /code, which I've never used and am not certain of the function.
It will also accept br in brackets as a line break; HTML allows these to be stacked, so you can add extra line breaks. I believe that such line breaks are fed into the hard return automatically, so they're not needed, but it may be that they are required for skipping more than one line (HTML ignores carriage returns in text and uses a separate p and /p combination for paragraph breaks, which do not stack but always feed a single line between the paragraphs).
The forum is set to permit one week during which to edit posts, after which they become permanent.
If anyone knows more about the coding, feel free to add to this thread. I'm going to (attempt to) make it sticky for reference, so don't clutter it with other things.
--M. J. Young
