HTML Basics
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Formatting Text
To make text bold, apply opening and closing bold tags—<b> and </b>—around the text you want affected:
<b>bold text</b> makes bold text
To make text italic, apply opening and closing italic tags—<em> and </em>—around the text you want affected:
<em>italic text</em> makes italic text
You can nest tags to apply more than one style at once. This may not work if you don't use the tags in the right, nested order—if you put an opening tag "inside" another opening tag, make sure its corresponding closing tag is "inside" the other tag's corresponding closing tag.
<b><em>italic and bold text</em></b> makes bold and italic text
Note: Because Web convention is that links are underlined, it is customary to avoid underlines in any other context.
Another crucial tag is the paragraph tag: <p> to open a paragraph and </p> to close it. The paragraph tag will function correctly even if you forget to close it, as long as you have a <p> at the beginning of every paragraph.
A list of useful tags is available at http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/reference/html_cheatsheet/ (look for the headers "text tags," "links," and "formatting" toward the center of the page). You can find other lists by searching the Internet.
Duplicate Formatting
The easiest way to format is to find text in the course or on a Web site formatted the way you want it, open the HTML code, copy it, paste it to where you want, and then just replace the text inside it.
Special Characters
Characters that are not in the standard 7-bit ASCII character set (which is American letters, digits, or $, #, @, ., or _) are referred to as "special characters." In HTML, these need to be coded. If you just paste or type them into the document text, some browsers may not display them correctly, even if your computer displays them without problems.
Luckily, one of the things the smart text setting in Blackboard discussion boards will do is convert such characters that you type into special characters when you submit the post.
See http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/reference/special_characters (or search the Internet) for a good basic list.
