Formatting poems and simple HTML

If you need to type an ampersand (&), type &amp; instead. If for some reason you need angle brackets (< and >), type &lt; and &gt;. If you need to insert literal [brackets which don't create a node], use &#91; and &#93; to create them.

If you need bold or italics, enclose bold sections in <B> and </B>, and enclose italic sections in <I> and </I>. Don't forget to close these sections, or they will run on to the end of your writeup.

For poems or lyrics, put a <BR> at the end of each line except use <P> between stanzas. At the end, type <P align=right> to start a right-aligned paragraph, and put the attribution in italics. Everything until the next <P> will be right-aligned.

If you're inserting a medium-length quotation, one stanza from a song, etc., into a longer writeup, put the <BLOCKQUOTE> and </BLOCKQUOTE> tags around it to indent it nicely from the rest of the text.

And by all means, put [ and ] around meaningful words and phrases in your writeup to provide links to related nodes.

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• First Item
• Second Item

This lets you create a list like:
<ul>
<li>First Item</li>
<li>Second Item</li>
</ul>

Brave New World was a really good book.

See, italics and bold mean nothing to blind people. Speaking web browsers can theoretically put vocal emphasis on stuff which needs to be emphasized. But if you use only the formatting (or only the functional) tags, then the semantic meaning is lost. Consider the two possibilities of how semantics must be decoded if you only use the formatting form:

*BRAVE NEW WORLD* was a *REALLY* good book.

Brave New World was a really good book.

Why nobody? Well, see, it used to be the case that HTML was a markup language, not a desktop publishing language. The whole idea was that the browsers could be setup to interpret tags as was appropriate for the reader (depending on how they've set things up or whatever). Unfortunately, Netscape being half-assed and treating them as the same led to people not knowing the difference, and so now people think that EM and STRONG are just deprecated, verbose versions of I and B.

Wow, a somewhat-contextual MaggieRant(tm) for once.