HTML Basics

HTML Basics

HTML coding has truly become a major factor in roleplaying these days. Everywhere you look, you'll see differences in color, font, pictures, et cetera. A wrestling match with two guys both skilled in writing might be decided by the use of the right style of HTML. If you watch the top wrestlers in any e-fed federation, you will see a lot of coding going on every roleplay. While this is only an overview of how to program within roleplays, hopefully it will give you the knowledge necessary to improve your posts.

Size

The first step to work with is changing the size of your font. The normal size for your font on most roleplay boards is "3". This gives you the ability to make the font larger or smaller, as you wish, by changing the number up or down. All you have to do is put the code before your text.

Of course, it's not recommended to make any radical changes in the size of the font. The smaller you write it, the harder it is for the President to read. The larger it is, the more irritating it can seem, especially if you go beyond "5". The best way to use the size code is by manipulating single lines, to make them stand out. If you want to end the size change and make the font return to "3", simply type at the point you wish it to stop.

Color

The color code is very similar to size. Color is a definite plus in a roleplay, as long as you choose the correct colors. If the background of the roleplay board is black, for example, you wouldn't want to use a dark color, or else it might not show up very well, which always irritates a President when he has to highlight the words to read it.

There are a lot of different colors out there, and it would take a while to give you a complete list. But most of the primary colors are at your disposal, and well and darker and lighter shades. Experiment and find one that suits your character, or stick with one of the tried and true colors. Either way, you will have the ability to make your roleplays that much more noticable to the man (or woman) in charge of grading them.
Just like the size, if you wish to have your color cease after a line or paragraph, simply type
and it will go back to the original color of the page.

Centering

A lot of wrestlers choose to either center a single line to give it more emphasis, or decide to bring the whole roleplay to the center of the page. Centering is also used on pictures, to position them in the middle of the page. The code is deceptively simple.

Putting this code in front of your paragraph will automatically bring each word to the center of the page, or as close as it can get. A good example of this is the positioning of this HTML page. Without the center code, it would be moved to the left side, as it normally would go. To turn off centering, type

Face

A very rarely used method in roleplaying is changing the face of the font. A font face is a different way for the words to be typed. The main reason they are not used much is because if the person reading the roleplay does not have the "face" on their computer, it will not work. The code for this is also similar to size and color. Most HTML is this way, which makes it one of the easiest programming languages available. Here is the code:

There are numerous font faces for you to utilize, if you want to make your roleplay different from the others. I've listed a few of the more common ones below.
comic sans ms
impact
times new roman
arial black
mirror
mistral
simpson

Font Changes

There are many other methods of changing the font other than the size, the color, or the face. The most common are bold, italic, underline, and strike. Bold makes the font a little more noticable, as opposed to "non-bold". Italicizing leans everything to the right. Underlining is fairly self-explanatory, as is ~~Striking~~ . The code to utilize all of these are listed below.

To end any of these functions, do the same as with any other code: add a "/" at the beginning of it.

Pictures

The first step needed to post pictures in a roleplay is an address for the picture. If you have your own picture on your computer, you need to find a way to get it on the world wide web. Two easy methods are either asking your President to upload it to the federation's space, or getting your own page on Geocities , Angelfire , or another webpage system and uploading it there. Addresses are usually easy to get a hold of, just by right-clicking on the image. Make sure that the address is to the picture, and not just to the page you're on at the moment.
Once you have the address, it's simple to have it put into your roleplay. Just insert the address into the following code:

The picture should appear in your roleplay to the left of the screen. If you want to have it in the middle of the page, use the center code. In case you're interested in what, say, Shannon Shag-Nasty looks like, the example below tells it all.

Paragraph Breaks

These are less important for most federations, as Inside the Web and other roleplay boards separate the paragraphs for you. However, there may come a time that you need to know the ways to spread out the paragraphs. The codes are below.

Summary

Hopefully the codes listed above will give you a general sense of how to use HTML in your roleplays. It will take some time to get used to putting the code in the right places. Expect to mess them up from time to time. It happens to even the best roleplayers every so often, since one misspell will keep the code from working. The trick is to practice enough with HTML so that you feel comfortable using it. With enough luck, you can make it so that something like this...

... ends up looking like this:

The wrestler smiles and flexes his arms to the sides, showing off the muscle that must have taken years to build up. He looks like an opponent to fear.
It looks difficult when combined, but trust me, it's not. Remember, practice makes perfect. The more you utilize the codes in your roleplay, the easier they will become. Good luck.