How to Use HTML Inside a Text Area Box

From bulletin boards to networking websites such as Facebook and Myspace, socially interactive websites generally feature HTML enabled text boxes. Sometimes a formatting tool panel is not provided, so being able to use basic HTML to format your text is a handy skill to have. This guide will introduce you to the minimum of HTML tags you will need to make the best use of text boxes.

Instructions

1. Avoid using HTML headers or footers. If you already are familiar with HTML, you know that if you were composing a web page manually, there is a set of tags used to open and close the code for these pages. You do not need to use these in text boxes.

2. Understand the basic principles of HTML tags. For the basic sort of HTML that you will apply inside a text box, you will be mostly using tags that you insert within your text to identify the part of text that you want formatted. These tags come in sets of opening and closing tags, to denote where formatting begins and ends. The most commonly used tags of this type are for italics (<i> and </i>), bold face (<b> </b>) and underline (<u> and </u>). And example for italics would be: <i>I want this sentence italicized, but not the period at the end</i>.

3. Add alignment tags to your took kit. Tags control how your text is aligned and are employed just like the text formatting tags described in Step 2. The most common example is for centering (<center> and </center>).

4. Control font size and color. This is done in the same fashion as Step 2 and 3, but now your tags will have multiple commands. You begin and close the altered text with the <font> and </font> tags. However, you can add commands for size and color to the beginning font tag. If I wanted a line of text with 4 extra size points and to be colored green, the tags would look like this: <font size="+4" color="green">This is a big, green line of text</font>.

5. Learn to insert pictures. The tag for picture insertion is <img src="place picture URL here">. There is no closing tag. You will need a valid address for the picture you wish to insert into your text. If you wish to control where the alignment of the picture insertion, you can use the command "align" to do that. An example of a left aligned picture tag would be: <img src="your picture URL here" alight="left">

6. Make use of hyperlinks. Hyperlinks use beginning and ending tags to denote the text to be linked, as with the examples in Steps 2 through 4. The opening tag is <a href="your URL here"> and the closing tag is </a>. An example of hyperlinking in practice is: <a href="your linked URL here">This is the text I want linked up</a>.