Since I've noticed that a couple of new folks have either joined LJ, or
posted after a long absence (waves at
super_star_girl), and
since I just spouted off a comment describing the basic HTML tags, here's
another take on it, with the rough edges smoothed off.
Here are the essential tags for LJ. You can get away with nothing but these, and let LJ's automatic formatting take care of everything else.
Inside of paragraphs, <em> (emphasis), <strong> (bold), and
occasionally <cite> (italics, used for citations) <code>
(fixed-width), and <del> (strike-out). You can also use <i>,
<b>, <tt>, and <s>, but it's considered cheating.
<u> (underline) can also be used, but it's confusing given the
almost universal convention that links are underlined. See what I
mean?
<hr> (horizontal rule) and <img> (image) have their uses; they
are two of the three tags that do not need to be "closed" (see inside the cut).
<img> tags need two "attributes" between the "img" and the ">":
src="url-of-image"
to point to the image, and
alt="text"
to specify the text that a blind person
or search engine will see in place of the image. If an image is
just there as a spacer or decoration, you can use
alt=" "
.
The final essential tag is
<a href="url">anchor-text</a>, which makes a
link. The "a" comes from "anchor", for reasons that are now mainly
historical. On Livejournal, there are two more handy tags that turn into
special kinds of link: <lj user="username"> (which
doesn't need to be closed) links to a user's profile and journal, and
<lj-cut>...</lj-cut> cuts out a long block of text and
replaces it with a link. Add a text="link-text"
attribute to
replace the default "details".
( The rest is mostly useful outside of LJ. This is long enough, and probably boring enough, that it needs a cut )
So there you have it. For more details, all the rest of the tags and
attributes I've left out, and an excellent reference, see The Bare Bones Guide
to HTML.