Since I was made a content editor about two months ago, I've looked at the raw texts of a great many writeups, either because the writer had fled and left errors that needed correction, or through requests made at Broken Nodes, and the one thing I've noticed most often is that almost everyone who's ever written something here has awfully funny ideas about how HTML works.
Despite how good or competent many writeups seem, the formatting code often looks totally illiterate, almost random in its use. I realize that not everybody can pick up HTML as easily as others can, but there are so few tags that can be used here that not learning how to use them properly is really inexcusable, and (I daresay) offensively lazy.
Additionally, many seem to be stuck on using broken HTML 1.0 syntax. Given that HTML 1.0 is over 10 years old, I'd ask that anyone who is able to check out XHTML (the future!) and to use it as pedantically as you use words in your writeups.
Here's a summary of the tags you can use here, and how they work. Please memorize and use these, as they make reading things much easier, especially if you have to go back and edit something. A big, unbroken block of source code and text can't be all that easy to peruse to look for errors when necessary. Anyway, the list:
That about wraps up the tags that are allowed here on E2. Please use them frequently and with relish, safe in the knowledge that you're doing yourself a favor by making your work more easily editable for yourself, and for content editors should the need arise. Single unclosed <p> tags in between each paragraph may have sufficed back in 1995, but things are different now. Please keep this in mind as we move toward more advanced forms of how we see text. Clean code is easier on everyone, whether they realize it or not.
If you're serious about what you write here, please be serious about how you write it. This has been a public service announcement by the E2 Content Editors.