Blue Clicky things

Subject: Blue Clicky things
From: Melodeon
Date: 10 Jun 99 - 06:26 PM

How come so many of you can create blue clicky things in your e-mails? Computor illiterates like me would love to know. In my naievity I though all you did was write a link and magicaly it would appear in blue and everyone would click on it. But it doesn't. Help!

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Barbara
Date: 10 Jun 99 - 10:47 PM

Hello, Melodeon, welcome to one of our FAQs, what we really need to compile a list of... click on "Forum Search" and put HTML in the subject box. That'll find you a thread that answers this and other questions like it.
In quick general, you have to learn some HTML code. You put the code between angle brackets and you get paragraphs, end lines, italic, bold, big words, flashing words, and blue clicky things, among others.
Blessings,
Barbara

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From:
Date: 10 Jun 99 - 11:57 PM

If you want to read a primer on the HTML language go here. What I just wrote to get this effect was <a href="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimerAll.html">here</a>.

Murray

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Bert C
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 12:02 AM

Hi Melodeon,

Here's a simple example that may clarify things for you.

When you type it like this:

<A HREF = "http://www.mudcat.org">MUDCAT</A>

It comes out looking like this:

MUDCAT

Also, you can force a single line feed by typing this

<BR>

or a wider space by typing this

<P>

Hope this helps.

Bert C

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Wolfgang
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 03:31 AM

Murray,
I've read more than one dozen explanations to this question (and authored two or three), but your's the best so far.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Neil Lowe
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 07:13 AM

two questions:

1) where can I practice this without muddying up this thread?

2) if what you type is why did it come out as instead of MUDCAT ? In other words, when you were explaining it what did you do differently to get it to display the first time and MUDCAT the second time?

Okay, so that's three questions. I didn't do very well in school.

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: The_one_and_only_Dai
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 07:25 AM

OK, here's another attempt at providing a template.

Copy this:

<A HREF="replace this green bit with the address of where you want the clicky thing to lead to">replace this red bit with some text to describe where the clicky thing goes to</A>

I hope that helps.

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Wolfgang
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 07:32 AM

Neil,
1) in the HTML thread (it will be tidied by Joe Offer each couple of days).
2) if you type <a href etc. this will be read as an address as in your post above and the > or the < you have typed will not show in the message. Of course, you have to type something else, if you want them to show for us. You have to type (now it's getting difficult for me and I might make a mess) &lt to get us see < and &gt to get us see >, both of which this time are not interpreted as HTLM characters.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: The_one_and_only_Dai
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 07:40 AM

Wolfgang means, type &lt; to see < and &gt; to see >.

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Wolfgang
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 07:56 AM

Dai,
please tell me, how does my message look on your screen? On my screen it just looks like I wanted it to look and the basic information in my post looks identical to the one in your post. Puzzled

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Neil Lowe
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 07:57 AM

Thanks gentlemen, for the enlightenment. I see that I made a mess when I was trying to formulate my query. It's a tribute to your insightfulness that you knew what I was talking about.

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Wolfgang
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 08:04 AM

Dai,
I've looked into the document source and can see what you have made different but on my screen both results look identical.
Just for a test I now type what you have typed to look how that looks on my screen: type &lt; to see < and type &gt; to see >

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Jeri
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 08:21 AM

If you type &lt; you will get <

If you type &gt; you will get >

HTML Stuff is where people have been practicing. This thread also contains Dan Mulligan's very useful and concise primer on HTML

If you don't want to post your experiments, you can use Notepad to write them, save them as an "HTML" file on your computer, and open them with your web browser.

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: The_one_and_only_Dai
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 09:10 AM

Wolfgang; I suspect you are using a browser of the other sort. What is it (my bet is IE4...)

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Neil Lowe
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 10:28 AM

Jeri,

I took you up on your last suggestion in your post. That worked nicely. Thank you.

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: MudGuard
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 12:31 PM

Wolfgang,
you left out the semicolon after the &lt; and the &gt;
Andreas

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Barbara
Date: 11 Jun 99 - 01:12 PM

Joe and I also worked out a while back that his MSIE transcribed the code to Mudcat one way, and my Netscape Communicator read it another way. And yes, it was in relation to the angle bracket code.

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Herge
Date: 13 Jun 99 - 10:15 AM

Just testing this thing tintin

Herge

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Herge
Date: 13 Jun 99 - 10:17 AM

It didnt work I'll try again

here

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Herge
Date: 13 Jun 99 - 10:21 AM

HERE

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Herge
Date: 13 Jun 99 - 10:23 AM

tESTING tESTING

HERE.

tESTING

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Jeri
Date: 13 Jun 99 - 10:54 AM

Herge, there has to be a space between the "A" and the "HREF" in the beginning of the tag.

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From: Herge
Date: 13 Jun 99 - 04:20 PM

Thanks Jeri I'll try again here

Herge

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From:
Date: 13 Jun 99 - 08:42 PM

SGML, from which HTML is derived, in its infinite kindness allows you to use as many characters as you want (not including spaces and some special characters) to name many of its non printing stuff. For example, the single letter "a" stands for "anchor" which is HTML-ese for an active link. They could have decided to call it "ahref" instead. In order for your browser to know that "a" is the symbol for what you want and "href" is the next part, rather than "ahref" is a new function you have asked for, you need the space between "a" and "href".

The same applies to the names of special symbols. If you type &lta..... the browser thinks you are trying to use the special symbol named "lta". You don't want a space after "lt" because that will print as a space. So for the names of special characters you show it has ended by a semi-colon. If a space is to occur naturally, like the name of a non-ascii latin letter, then you can leave out the semi-colon.

Since most people using a browser don't want a list of the errors the maker of the HTML document has made each time he or she goes to it, the custom is for browsers to just politely ignore mistakes and pretend you didn't say it. So if it thinks you typed <ahref, it will look at the functions it knows, see there is no such thing as "ahref", and just not print anything until it reaches a place where things make sense again. That is why sometimes what you think you have typed just doesn't come out. It is the browser's discrete way of saying you have made a mistake.

Murray

Subject: RE: Blue Clicky things
From:
Date: 13 Jun 99 - 08:47 PM

Oh yes, and two more things. One of the special characters you can't use in the name of a function is the equal sign "=". so when you type "href=" it knows the function you want is "href". That uis why you don't need a space there.

The other thing is, at the moment threads that don't deal with music are labeled "(BS)". Perhaps there should be a name for threads that deal with how to use Mudcat. If we were logicians we would call them "metathreads".

Murray