Useful and Permitted HTML tags

You can use HTML tags in your description and messages to jazz it up a little with colours, styles and smilies. HTML is really easy to use: just surround the text you want to format by the opening '<x>' and closing '</x>' HTML tags you want to use. Please see the note below on security and permitted tags. Here are some examples of HTML:

Effect	What you Write	Looks Like	Explanation
Bold text	<b>Sample</b>	Sample	<strong> and <b> are equivalent
Italic text	<i>Sample</i>	Sample	<em> and <i> are equivalent
Underlined text	<u>Sample<u>	Sample
Blinking text	<blink>Sample</blink>	Sample	Warning: blink is not always a good idea.
Superscript	Super<sup>script</sup>	Superscript
Subscript	Sub<sub>script</sub>	Subscript
Strikethrough	<strike>Sample</strike>	Sample	<strike> and <s> are equivalent
Monospace	<tt>Sample</tt>	Sample	Fixed-width font. (Use <pre> for pre-formatted text)
Colour	<font color="Green">Sample</font>    or <font color="#RRGGBB">Sample</font>	Sample	RRGGBB are hex values of Red, Green, Blue from 00-FF More examples are here.
Font Size	<h1>Sample</h1>    or <font size=6>Sample</font>	Sample	Values of 1-6 are allowed. <h1> and <font size=6> are the largest. You can also use <big> and <small>.
Font Face	<font face="arial">Sample</font>	Sample	Warning: not everyone has the same fonts available.
Paragraph	<p>........</p>		Not usually necessary: just insert new lines
Line Break	<br>	Line break inserted manually	Not usually necessary: just insert new line(s). No closing </br> tag is required.
Horizontal rule	<hr>		No closing </hr> tag is required.
Accented Characters	&eacute;   &egrave;	é     è	These begin with & and end with a semi-colon. See below.
Lists	<ul> <li>first <li>second <li>third </ul>	first second third	<ul>.......</ul> is an un-ordered (bullet) list <ol>.......</ol> is an ordered (numbered) list <li> begins each list element.
Emoticons	<smile> , <frown> , <wink> , <heart>		"Pseudo-html" tags. See below for a complete list.

Please note that, in the interests of security, only the following tags are permitted:

<b>  <i>  <u>  <strong> <em> <blink> <sup> <sub> <strike> <s> <big> <small> <font (attributes: face, color, size)>
<h1> - <h6> (attribute: align)
<pre> <tt> <hr> <br> <p (attribute: align)>
<ul> <ol> <li>
<center>

Any other tags will simply appear in plaintext. If you wish to include a URL, you must give it in plain text. As for images, they may be stored on our server: see the photograph page for instructions on how. We hope that this allows (almost) all the functionality you would wish; while further enhancing security (by blocking javascript, external links etc).

Automatic new lines, single spaces
New lines (pressing [ENTER]) are automatically preserved. You do not normally need to insert <p> or <br> tags. (To be precise, the server uses nl2br().)
Only single spaces are preserved: multiple spaces '    ' are shown as a single space ' '. If you don't want this, use <pre> or &nbsp;. (HTML is designed this way.)

Using Symbols, such as è
This is easy to do using character entity tags. An entity tag begins with an ampersand '&' and ends with a semi-colon ';' .
Common entities are: é , è , ê , ç , < , > , & . These are written respectively as: &eacute;  ,  &egrave;  ,  &ecirc;  ,  &ccedil;  ,  &lt;  ,  &gt;  ,  &amp;  .

Nesting tags inside one another
HTML-tags may be "nested", like russian dolls. For example, <b><i>text</i></b> gives you bold,italic text.
Be careful to always close tags in the reverse order from which you opened them. Don't write things like: <b><i>oops</b></i>

Why doesn't ASCII Art Work?
ASCII art is where images are drawn using the letters, numbers and symbols in a fixed-width font. There is an example (a penguin) below. However, in HTML, multiple spaces are rendered using only a single space and the text is usually displayed in a variable width font. You can get around this by specifying preformatted text by enclosing it in <pre> </pre>. Because our HTML filter converts newlines into <br>\n, if you are using <pre>, you also need to remove all newlines from your ASCII art and replace them by <br>, or you'll get two newlines where you only want one. Please also use the character entities instead of literal &, <, or > characters.

(o_ //\ V_/_

This is what you need to write: <pre>    (o_<br>    //\<br>    V_/_<br>   </pre>

Pesudo-code
Pseudo-code is the art of making up pretend tags to express meaning. For example <explanation>, <flamebait>, or <hat type="captain">. Use whatever you like, and it will be rendered as you expect (but be careful not to use something that is a valid smiley).

Smileys
You can use any text smiley such as :-) that you want. If you would like to use an image, then simply insert the relevant pseudo-html tag. These are the ones which work - if you'd like any others, please submit them...

What you Write	Looks Like	What you Write	Looks Like	What you Write	Looks Like	What you Write	Looks Like
<smile>		<laugh>		<happy>		<grin>
<sun>		<glasses>		<heart>		<heart2>
<hug>		<wink>		<tongue>		<frown>
<sad>		<surprise>		<shock>		<annoyed>
<mad>		<devil>		<dizzy>		<sleepy>
<bed>		<jester>		<party>		<birthday>
<xmas>		<pumpkin>		<cat>		<cat2>
<dog>		<tux>

HTML toolbar
In the edit and sendmessage pages, there is a toolbar, underneath the text-field for advert/message composition. Click any of the buttons to embed the relevant HTML tag. If you have some text already selected, just click the [B] button, and it will be made bold; if no text is currently selected, the [B] button will insert the placeholder 'Bold text', ready for you to edit. The toolbar looks like this: