HTML Tags and You

So, I have noticed that a couple people are having problems with how to link items, and I just wanted to put together a quick "how to".

Links

The most common element that you will probably use in your posts.
<a href="http://nearbygamers.com">Nearby Gamers</a>
To keep it simple, you use the 'a' tag (stands for anchor). The href part contains the html reference link. Between the two anchor tags, you put some text. This is what actually gets displayed. You can put the original link there if you want, too.

Block Quotes

Occasionally, you may want to quote another post, so people know what the context is for your post. For this, we use the <blockquote> tag. Simple open the tag, drop the text that you want quoted, and close the tag. Simply as that.

<blockquote>So, something like this, which can be text from anyone else's post that you decided to quote.</blockquote>.

Will end up looking like this. It is nice and formatted, and looks pretty at the top (or bottom) of your post, where you can seamlessly add your own comments, concerns, suggestions, rebuttals, etc.

I'll add more html tags here as the community deems them needed for the average beginner. However, I think these two tags will take care of most of the posts that people will make.

-Aeryn

Okay, so I wrote the link like this:

Screen Monkey

Nothing happens, for this specific example what am I doing wrong?

I'm assuming you have edit permission on this post and can go in and see my f'd up coding. Can you fix what I've written and I'll go in under edit mode after and see the corrected version?

<a href="http://www.nbos.com/products/screenmonkey/screenmonkey.htm">Screen Monkey<a>

becomes

Screen Monkey

I have not extra edit permissions. I'm just another user on the site, just like you. I can look at the history of your post (as everyone can), but that only shows me what gets outputted to the screen, not the raw tags

Speaking of all things fun with HTML: I use a programming library named Tidy to clean up comments. The benefit is that if you forget to close a tag, or someone decides it'd be funny to end their post with the HTML to increase font size 900%, the rest of the comments on the page won't be messed up. (I also use Tidy on tag pages and profiles.) The cost is that unless your HTML has all the quotes and slashes in the right places, Tidy will guess what you were trying to do or, more likely, strip it out.

I'm the only person right now with complete access to the database. Looking at your post, I can see you're missing the href= part of your link.

I've added "view raw message in history" to my todo list, but as it's not very important it'll be a long while.