When you post online, the editor usually has an option that lets you view the html source. If you are having trouble with the WYSIWYG editor, try viewing the html source.

Here are some html tags that are good to know if you view the html source. Feel free to edit the source.

To be safe and not waste your work, open up Wordpad on your computer and copy the original source to your Wordpad file. Make another copy and make your changes in Wordpad. Then copy your changes back to the online editor. That way, if anything goes wrong you still have your work.

If you are cutting and pasting from other documents, paste into Wordpad and then save the file as plain text. Then load another document and reload the document you just saved to clear out all the formatting. This is the cleanest and fastest way I know to clean out the formatting. You can use this keyboard short cut to do this in a second.

Alt-f a enter - to save file without the formatting
Alt-f 2 - to load whatever was the last file you had in Wordpad
Alt-f 2 - again to reload the file you were working on without the formatting

Html useful tags

<a href="url"></a> - link to another page
<br /> - break to a new line
<div></div> - division of your page, sometimes used in place of p tag
<h1></h1> - heading level 1, also for levels 2-6
<img src="url" /> - images
<li></li> - list items between the ol and ul tags
<ol></ol> - ordered list
<p></p> - paragraph
<table></table> - table
<tr></tr> - table row, between the table tags
<td></td> - table cells between the table row tags
<ul></ul> - unordered list

There is often a lot of junk the editors put in that you can delete, such as these tags.

#160; - non-breaking space
&nbsp; - another version of a non-breaking space

<font></font> - to create a different style within another tag. Generally you can delete this. It is usually mistaken formatting.

<span></span> - to create a different style within another tag. Generally you can delete this. It is usually mistaken formatting.

Attributes - with the tag you can specify attributes appropriate for that tag. These are the two attributes you use to specify styles.

class="stylename" - add this to any tag to specify a style name

style="font-size:120%; margin-right:.5em;" - use the style attribute to specify the style characteristics. In this example the margin-right:.5em means to set the right margin to half the width of the letter "m".

For example

<p class="highlight">Highlight this.</p>

<p style="font-size:20%;">Bigger font</p>

By Andrew Weitzen (c) 2010

Weitzen is the publisher of several online Internet journals including: InternetHandholding.com, DomainNames.gs, DotNetNuke.bz, Programmer.bz, Software.vg, WebHosting.vg