Dave, I’ve just started a weblog of my own and am finding that I need to learn a few HTML tags to make my entries as attractive as possible. I’d also like to learn how to link to other sites and other Weblogs, but really haven’t much of a clue other than that HTML has < and > around different letters. Can you give me a quick primer?

While most Weblog systems I’ve seen let you just type in your entries with blank lines and let it do the magic of transforming it into clean and valid HTML, you’re right that to get the most out of your weblog writing, you’ll need to learn a few basic HTML tags. Fortunately, it’s easy.

The most important tag is the pair <p> and </p> which surround each paragraph of your input (I’m assuming that you don’t want to use “convert line breaks” but want to have control over all facets of your entry formatting. If not, you can safely skip this particular tag). Rather than using blank lines, just use the common sequence of </p><p> between each paragraph, making sure to start with a <p> and end with a </p>, of course.

A few text formatting tags…

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