More Basic HTML Codes

In his article "Basic HTML Codes", Rian Wing explains a few basic HTML codes that can be used to jazz up personal pages on MySpace, Yahoo! 360 and blogging sites. He covers the coding necessary to bold, italicize and underline text, as well as change the color of text. But there are more simple codes you can use to change the look of your pages.

Strike through

If you've ever seen a page with text that looks like it's crossed out, you've seen someone use the HTML tag for strikethrough. In order to have text on your page with a line through it, you will need to use one of the following HTML codes: or . Just like tags used to bold, italicize or underline text, you will have to "turn off" the strikethrough with one of the following tags: or . Make sure that whichever tag you choose to use, you use it consistently.

Example of correct use of the strikethrough tag:
This text is crossed out.

Example of incorrect use of the strikethrough tag:
This text is crossed out.

Centering text

If you'd like your text to be centered, you can use the tag. Like other text formatting tags, it will need to be "turned off" or closed with the tag. Although this tag is no longer considered to be in active use by the W3C, it should still work on sites like LiveJournal and MySpace. If you like the look of center-justified text, feel free to continue to use this tag.

You also have the option of using the

tag to center a block of text. At the start of the text block, you would enter the tag and "turn off" or close the tag with . Although this is technically the "correct" way to center text, you can probably see why most people still prefer using the tag.

Adding a blank line

If you'd like to add a blank line to break up large blocks of text, you have two choices. First, you could use paragraph tags to automatically insert blank lines between each section. To use paragraph tags, you would use the

tag at the beginning of the block of text and a tag to "turn off" or close the paragraph. You should then immediately place another tag at the beginning of your next sentence and keep opening and closing paragraph tags around each separate text block.

Your other option is to use the
tag to insert a blank line. This tag does not need to be closed, and you can use it multiple times to insert multiple blank lines.

Adding a ruled line

If you'd like to add a line to break up large amounts of text (or to signal a change of topic in your blog), you can do so easily with the HTML tag . Unlike most other HTML tags, this tag does not need to be "turned off" or closed. Anytime you use the tag, it will insert a line across the page. You should be aware that this tag automatically inserts a blank line under the ruled line, but not above it.

Adding a text link

Adding a text link is exceptionally simple, but it is also one of the most common places that people make mistakes when editing the HTML on their personal sites. In order to add a text link, you must know the URL of the site you want to link to. Let's say you wanted to put a link to the Associated Content homepage. The URL for the Associated Content homepage is http://www.associatedcontent.com. It's very important that you include the "http://" part of the URL when making a text link.

The tag you need to know for creating text links is . This tag is "turned off" or closed with the tag . In order to create a text link, you will insert the words you would like to use as a link between the two tags as is done in the following example.

Example of correct use of the text link tag:
Check out Associated Content!

This will result in text that appears as follows:

Check out Associated Content!

Adding an image

In order to add an image to your page, you will need to use the image source tag. This tag works similarly to the text link tag explained above. The image source tag looks like this and will be modified in the same way (with an equals sign and a URL contained in quotation marks) as the text link tag.

The other thing you need to know is where on the internet your image is stored. If you sign up for free webspace with a image storing server like Flickr or Photobucket, then you will be able to get your URL to use when adding an image automatically generated for you.

Then you simply insert the URL of the image into the image source tag as in the example below:

Example of correctly use of the image source tag:

Unlike the text link tag, the image source tag does not need to be "turned off" or closed. It is, however, critical that you use the entire URL of the image (including the file extension, which will normally be either ".gif" or ".jpg"), as well as start the url with "http://".