h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Please tell me the basic guideml codes for an entry/basic outlay.

Please also tell me what is the difference between a title and an heading.


Please also tell me how to do lists.

Please also tell me how to do bold, underline, italic, left align, centred and right aligned text.

Thank you.

Hello JA,

The basic layout of a Guide-ML article is as follows:


stuff you type



The GUIDE and BODY tags should be added automatically when you switch to Guide-ML mode. Note how there is a closing tag for each opening tag (marked with a / character). Note also that they are nested rather than overlapping. Do not remove these tags - they are important.

When you use Test###### or TestUserPage###### on someone else's article you will also see some tags outside this layout:

your title
...


The text between the SUBJECT tags is what you typed into the separate title box and shows up as a heading above the rest of your text.

If you want to have another heading within your article:
This is the same size as the title one
This is slightly smaller

If you want more information about any specific tag, you can visit the <./>GuideML-Clinic</.>. The title is generally the text you type in the subject field of the article and this appears in large letters at the top. To split the article up inside, you can use s and to create breaks, as SEF said you can use testXXXXXX to look at the guideML for any page to give you some examples to work with. Bold and italics can be done with the and tags.

spelugx -- <./>guru</.>

There are a couple of types of list in Guide-ML. is the tag for an Unordered List using bullet characters to mark each point and is the tag for an Ordered List using automatically numbered instructions. Both of these tags use for each line or List Item in the list.


this is a short idea
this is another one
yet another



This is my first instruction and it is in a paragraph.
My second one is also done this way to keep the text together.
I'd better have a third which also won't overlap the numbers.


Note the opening and closing pairs (those 2 words in bold) and nesting (that word in italics) of tags (underlined) again.

Text can be positioned within a paragraph or inside a or by flowing around a . The bit to specify the alignment goes inside the opening tag and must have quotes round the value. For example:





Note the American spelling!
PICTURE is an example of a self-closing tag. The / character goes at the end. This example was embedded so that text will flow round it as the computer sees fit.

Hi spelugx! [waves]
I wondered why no-one else was up to answer this.

SEF, its only 10:19, I'm still here.

*** The following is Off-Topic. Ignore it.

" - Note the American spelling!"

That's an interesting one. This is obviously to keep it consistent with the HTML version, which is all standardised (-ized?) with American spellings. But wouldn't it be nice if GuideML (which is not HTML) allowed us to spell the word CENTRE our way, and then the GML->HTML parser converted it back to the American spelling? Mmmhm. I'll think about that for my content-management framework I'm building for my site (nothing like as grand as DNA, of course )

~

** Also off-topic.

Shouldn't your CMS use content-centric markup not presentation-centric markup anways?

"PICTURE is an example of a self-closing tag." - if you want it to be!

You could easily write if you wanted (although obviously SEF's way is quicker). This approach allows you to put a caption in-between the opening and closing tags (for example, my space at U208060 has 'Clearly not me, as it's not purple' for the owl picture thereon).

~

PS All this stuff's ready and waiting for you to read at the <./>GuideML-Clinic</.> (there's not too much to read, as GuideML is kept as simple as possible).

***Still off topic:

You're quite right, Spelugx ... I wasn't thinking straight. Of course the skins will sort out presentation stuff when it comes to tables and stuff, but it'd still be nice to be able to float pictures left and right of the text at Markup-level, despite not being totally _in_)...

~

Guide-ML takes the opposite view to some HTML people in advocating the use of presentation specific tags such as rather than and rather than over content specific ones such as . I prefer and myself but I'm not sure why is listed as unapproved.

Speaking of extra features not normally used or mentioned, I sometimes give lists a "title":
This is my list
with an extra top line
which doesn't have a bullet
but is still indented

I suspect is unapproved for the pure and simple reason that is looks HORRIBLE!

If you ask any teacher or staff trainer anywhere in the world, they'll tell you that underlining was only invented for the sake of convenience when writing by hand (people have forgotten these days how to write in italics, and bold is just impossible - the closest we have is so-called "Blackboard Bold"), but was never intended to make the transition to printed form.

You will never see an official letter, or a technical document, or even a novel that has been written correctly containing any underlined text, because it is hard to read and looks messy. You'll also notice that the two BBC skins on h2g2 (alabaster and brunel) only underline their links when they mouseover (my site is the same) - this reduces screen-clutter considerably, and makes the whole thing easier to read.

The other possibility is that for those using GOO, underlined text may look like hyperlinks, when it is not.

~

The link confusion could make sense. Underline is one of the valid options on the BBCi message boards but those don't have clickable links within message text. I don't agree with it necessarily being horrible though. Strikeout doesn't even rate a mention. This is a very old typing thing which still persists in official documents to mark specification changes but would be silly in an allegedly final article.

I think is not generally used anywhere on the net as it is the standard way of marking links. The number of times i have tried to click on a title, and found it was just someone using a tag... Very frustrating.

Tango

But my argument that it makes text look horrible still stands.

Spelugx The Guideml clinic is too confusing for me to understand that is why I do not use it.

Thank you for your helpful advice.

JA

SEF please tell me how can I borrow someone elses Guideml codes in their enteries.

SEF thank you for your helpful advice.

ja

There was some discussion a while back about whether GuideML should use purely semantic tags, thus getting rid of and and so forth and replacing them with and and other such things. It was decided not to for various reasons...

Frankly, it's still quite difficult to do pure semantic markup even in XHTML - for that you need to be able to specify arbitrary XML tags and link to their formatting descriptions inside any web page, and that's not something browsers widely support.

is extremely ugly. I hate it.

OwlofDoom and Tango thank you for your helpful advice.

JA