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

When I come to embed HTML tags in my home page document, it duplicates the last line.

Any Ideas ?

lucky you it just removed mine???

It does appear to go a bit mutant when you put in HTML tags. I'll see if I can replicate this behaviour here.
But it probably won't work For me, it seems to randomly repeat text within tags, and monkey around with whether a tag is
a start or end tag. Mondo weirdo, and a tad non-hoopy.

It is probably H2G2ML really.

All I can discover is in your own page entries (rather than forum
replies which get marked up for you) you can use P/ at the start
of a paragraph and P\ at the end of the paragraph to add blank lines.
(both codes in greaterthan and lessthan brackets of course)

I also have found the HTML a bit strange. For those from the U.S., it seems that one must use
the British (Canadian) spelling of colOUr to get colored fonts with a fontcolour='s tag.

That's nice. We (British-type people) can annoy you (American-type people) for a change!

I have also noticed an 'interesting' phenomenon on my homepage. I have put in an bit of javascript that displays my age (so I don't have to keep updating it) but I was having real problems getting a link to the JS function. I discovered that the problem was that the conversion to H2G2ML was causing anything between /" is converted to lower case thus spoiling my function call. Also when I put a void into the "javascript:void bob()" it caused several lines after the call to be deleted and the anchor tag changed to somthing like:
which is really messed up!!
Incase you are wondering why I was using the /" it is because I was using document.write() to put the link in.

I have got it working now (but haven't implemented the parts for browsers other than IE =>4).

G.

Well said!!!

S

How do you go about embedding HTML in the home document anyway. I tried...and failed.
I'm a relative beginner when it comes to HTML anyway.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Cheers

S

Any HTML you use in pages gets parsed as XML when it's displayed, and so has to be well-formed XML.

If you don't know anything about XML, but you know a little HTML, don't worry. All it means in practice is:

1) All tags that open should be closed somewhere.
In other words, don't use empty tags as paragraph breaks.
It's much better to wrap your paragraphs properly tags as paragraph breaks.
It's much better to wrap your paragraphs properly like this.

2) If you must use an empty tag (e.g.

2) If you must use an empty tag (e.g. or , where it's silly to have a closing tag) turn it into a valid XML tag by putting a slash (/) before the closing angle-bracket (&gt.
In other words, becomes , , becomes , etc.

3) All tag attribute values should be surrounded with quote-marks.
i.e. is bad. is good.

4) Try to use HTML that will fit in with the rest of the site's look.
i.e., avoid changing fonts, breaking the main layout tables, throwing in loads of extra images, etc.

5) Don't use Javascript.
Partially to stay in line with point 3, but mainly because our parser will probably choke on it and it just won't work.

We'll be putting up a proper document about adding HTML to your pages with these and other tips soon.

-- Yoz

My sample HTML has gotten horribly, horribly mangled, which is especially embarrassing if I'm trying to show people how to do it properly.
(However, H2G2 treats HTML in forum text differently than in the rest of the site, so I have a small excuse)
Let's try again:

1) All tags that open should be closed somewhere.
In other words, don't use empty tags as paragraph breaks.
It's much better to wrap your paragraphs properly like this.

2) If you must use an empty tag (e.g.<IMG> or <HR>, where it's silly to have a closing tag) turn it into a valid XML tag by putting a slash (/) before the closing angle-bracket (&gt.
In other words, <HR> becomes <HR/>, <IMG src="hello.jpg"> becomes <IMG src="hello.jpg"/> etc.

3) All tag attribute values should be surrounded with quote-marks.
i.e. <IMG src=hello.jpg border=0/> is bad. <IMG src="hello.jpg" border="0"/> is good.

7) New point just learned: Don't bother trying to type normal HTML into forum postings - if, like me, you have to talk about HTML, use the standard "<" and ">" entities instead!

-- A sadder and wiser Yoz

Cheers Yoz!!!!

S