Contribution Formatting Instructions

You will notice that some contributions to the website are just "lumps of text" with no paragraph breaks or emphasis, while other contributions have bold, italics, links, and paragraphs.

This is important. Lumps of text are hard to read, while nicely formatted, well-written comments are a pleasure to read.

How does one format comments? By learning a very modest amount of HTML. Use the examples below to format your contributions as you see fit. Note that you don't need to become an expert in html, but at least learn how to insert paragraph breaks.

Italics

Writing

This text is <i>italicized</i>.

Gives you

This text is italicized.

Bold

Writing

This text is <b>bold</b>.

Gives you

This text is bold.

Paragraphs

Writing

This is the end of a paragraph. <p>And this is the start of a new paragraph.

Gives you

This is the end of a paragraph.

And this is the start of a new paragraph.

Bullet Lists

Writing

<ul><li>Apples<br><li>Oranges<br><li>Milk</ul>

Gives you

• Apples
• Oranges
• Milk

Numbered Lists

Writing

<ol><li>Eggs<br><li>Bread<br><li>Tofu</ol>

Gives you

1. Eggs
2. Bread
3. Tofu

Links

Writing

Here is a link to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com">The NY Times</a>.

Gives you

Here is a link to The NY Times.

Note that all of the html tags are in lowercase. There is a bug in the system that drops tags if they are mixed case. For example, the second tag in

This <b>word</B> is in bold.

would get dropped, which means that everything after "word" would appear bold. Until we can find the bug, use only lowercase in your html tags.