Love the "archy and mehitabel" reference.

Ahem, most of the "oops" errors above would have been avoided if the posters bothered to PREVIEW THEIR POSTS, which has also been repeatedly recommended, especially when you post messages with embedded HTML.

Note that many things people post here are ill-formed HTML--the errors just happen to be treated benignly by some browsers (for the time being). The most common errors are failing to encode ampersands, angle brackets, accented characters and symbols; and improperly closing or nesting tags. For instance, the only time you should type raw angle brackets is as part of an HTML tag; an angle bracket followed by a space (as in Sugwash's message) is improper, as are bare angle brackets in ABC. And nesting I and B tags within a tag of the same type is dicey, if not illegal outright.

Someone above suggested that if you want to quote someone, retaining his formatting, then cut-n-paste from an HTML source view. Don't do it. It's too easy to create ill-formed HTML that way. First, you may end up nesting their italics within your own. Second, you may end up importing a start or end tag without its mate.

Even worse is to import text this way from other sites or word processors. It may contain style references which aren't defined here--word processors are particularly likely to use such proprietary style information. Or you may be pasting HTML corresponding to a later version than the Mudcat pages support, or which is in reality XHTML, XML or some other format which only superficially resembles HTML. So unless you're HTML-savvy--and careful--don't copy raw HTML. It's better to paste unformatted text and add formatting tags yourself, tedious as this may be. And preview before submitting.

Unfortunately, even previewing may not expose some common errors--Mudcat input validation seems limited to suppressing tags that might allow hacking, not to detecting ill-formed or non-portable constructs.