TarBoard is written in HTML (Hypertext Markup language), which has its own formatting instructions, and the text you post is also posted as HTML. If you want to be able to make your posts look nicer then you'll need to understand these formatting instructions, but don't worry, they are pretty easy.... as long as this file doesn't become corrupted thus rendering the instructions that should follow as utter Gibber-ish.
(You're it!) The things that affect the format of the text are Hypertext tags.
These are short commands placed within less than "<" and greater
than ">" symbols, eg: In the sections which follow we will introduce some of the tags which can be used for simple text formatting. Basic Formatting (Easy stuff) To formatted your text on TarBoard you need only know a few tags. These are: <P> - New paragraph For example to make a piece of text bold you would type: leave a blank line or use a carriage return within the message box.
Special Characters There are numerous special characters, but these are the most important codes to know: & - Ampersand (&) More special characters HERE. Colours and Sizes (The Pretty Stuff!) Once you have mastered these simple tags you can add a few more which might be useful: <font SIZE=+1> </font> - Change the FONT size These tags introduce a few new concepts, specifically colours and font sizes. Font Sizes are expressed as a number from 1 to 7. In Netscape the standard size is three. You can either set the font size to something + or - the current size, or to an absolute value. Therefore you could do any of the following: The font sizes look like the following: Size 1 Size 2 Size 3 Size 4 Size 5 Size 6 Size 7 Font colours are slightly more difficult, and will not be displayed on anything less than Netscape 2.0 anyway. The colour is specified as a # (hash) followed by three pairs of Hexadecimal digits representing RED, BLUE and GREEN respectively. Each pair runs from 00 to FF (Hex digits are base 16, i.e. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F). Therefore FF0000 is bright red, 00FF00 is bright green and 0000FF is bright blue. Here are a few examples:
More Colours HERE. Links and Images (Getting Fancy) Finally, you can try the most exciting part of HTML, adding images and hypertext links to other documents. To do this you include a tag that specifies the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the target document. Think of the URL as the address of the document. You can copy it from a link in Netscape, or make it yourself. The two most common kinds of URL are:
To add a hypertext link to another page you specify that the tag will be a Hypertext reference (HREF), cite the URL of the document to link to and then indicate what you would like the name of the link to be (this is what will appear on the notice board): e.g. will produce Images are typically handled in the same way; using the IMG tag instead of HREF, and only citing the URL of the image: e.g. Swallow GIF.NB. TarBoard oddity - When entering links i.e. <A HREF = "http://.....">.....</A>. DO NOT press the Links of the form <A HREF = "/~tarboard/messages/####.htm">a particular message number ####</A> will work from within messages and the latest message page. TarBoard auto Links and Images Using The TarBoard auto link and auto image options on the message posting form At the end of the nessage posting form are three boxes which automate the task of adding links to messages and save you the task of having to write a little HTML. For links to other web resources - one needs to place the address of the resource you want to link to (known as the Universal Resource Locator or URL ) in the box labelled:- "Optional Link URL:" It must start with "http://" then put a title for the link in the box labelled :- "Link Title :" N.B. If you forget the title - no link will be formed. To include an image which is on another web site - just place
the URL of the image, "Optional Image URL:"
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