Enhancements in the Chatroom

Enhancing your Chats

Material gleaned from online sources and Ian Graham's HTML Source Book

People have asked how we do the special things like large size fonts, blinking and things like that. Here's the information on how to accomplish those effects in the chatroom. SOME of the commands have been disabled on the RFC. Blink is gone and the sizing on the font command is eliminated. This happened because there was someone in there the other day who was a bit abusive about it.

The term HTML means Hyper Text Markup Language. This allows you to write something and ADD to it afterwards to enhance it and make it easier.

You've had a bit of it in the document about adding pictures. This is found at Pictures

Now we take to the realm of enhancing your text online in the chatroom.

To start, we must remember that the items we are talking about are referred to as elements or tags. Every one of them MUST have a closing element to go with them. Exceptions will be noted. All of the elements are enclosed inside < and >. For example, to cause something to blink, we would enclose the word blink within the two, like this <BLINK>. The element used as a closer is much the same except that it goes </BLINK>.

Blinking Blinking is the most popular one and most likely to be abused. Please if you forget to put a closing tag on something, DON'T let it be this one. The element is the word BLINK If we want to actually cause the word run in the sentence John will run there to blink we shall write the sentence this way

John will <BLINK>run</BLINK> there

What will show is this :

John will run there.

Other elements of interest in this discussion are:

BIG As the word implies, it makes the characters appear larger. Using the same word and sentence from the first example...

John will <BIG>run</BIG> there

giving this: John will run there.

There is an equivalent for shrinking text -

SMALL works exactly the same as BIG eg.

John will <SMALL>run</SMALL> there

giving us -> John will run there



FONT offers another chance to change sizes AND it also allows us to 
change colours as well. Here's how it works.

<FONT SIZE="n">


where n = 1 to 6. Normally the font is defaulted to size 3. You can make
the size relative to the default font, by using a + or -.
where + will increase and - will decrease the size of the text being 
output. eg. 


<FONT SIZE="+n"> or <FONT SIZE=-n>


For our example sentence would go:


John will <FONT SIZE="+3">r</FONT>

<FONT SIZE="+2">u</FONT>

<FONT SIZE="-1">n</FONT> there.


showing ->           

John will 
run 
there.


    Note, the closing element is the name of
the tag with the / in front of it. The rest, SIZE etc, is an
attribute of the element.


    Now colour is another attribute of the FONT tag,
but it is spelled COLOR here, since the software is American.
Colour is done in a weird format. It's called hexadecimal, meaning 16, in
triplets. This is of the form #rrggbb, where the rr = 00 to FF,
specifying up to 256 different shades of colour. The rr = red, gg = green
and the bb = blue. This corresponds to the three colours which make up the
RGB monitors. Now the lower the number you have, the darker it gets, so
Black would be #000000. Red would be #FF0000, and Green would be #00FF00
with Blue being #0000FF and White would be #FFFFFF. 

    Note, at ALL times there should be 6 characters
after the # symbol. Other colours would come from modifying the
numbers. Valid characters would be 0 to 9 and A through F, inclusive. This
gives you 16 characters per position. 

Our test sentence could look like this:

John will <FONT COLOR="#FF0000">r</FONT>

<FONT COLOR="#00FF00">u</FONT>

<FONT COLOR="#0000FF">n</FONT> there.


Which will give ->     
John will run there.



On some browsers like the Microsoft Internet Explorer you can use these 
names as colours:


Black     Lime    
Olive     Fuschia

Teal      White   
Red       Purple

Blue      Green   
Aqua      Maroon

Navy      Yellow  
Gray      Silver






    Next we talk about the bold, italics, underlined
and fixed type elements. This looks different while still maintaining the
size and colours of the surrounding text. They make the words or
characters more distinctive.


They are <B>, <I>, <U>, and <TT>.

Don't forget the closers.



Bold    John will <B>run</B> there.

John will run there.



Italics    John will <I>run</I> there.

John will run there.



Underline    John will <U>run</U> there.

John will run there.



Typewriter Font    John will <TT>run</TT> 
there.
 John will run there.

    One special effect is to combine any and all of
the above. See how it looks. Remember, whatever order you use in
combination, you must set the closers in the reverse order. For
instance.


John will 
<B><I><FONT SIZE=+2 COLOR="#FF0000">run</FONT></I></B>
there.


John will run there.








Oh yes, there's more stuff. Almost forgot about the Paragraph and Line
Break and Horizontal Line commands. These can be used to break up the 
text into separate sections. These don't require a closer at all. 

Paragraph - <P> - This will separate the text with a blank line 
between. You can also set the next paragraph to be centered with this in 
addition <P ALIGN="CENTER">


Line Break - <BR> - This will start a new line at that point.

Horizontal Ruler - <HR> - This will act like the <P&;gt; command
except that it will display a horizontal line across the screen between
two blank lines. You can size the line by putting a WIDTH attribute in it.
The Percentage can be 0 to 100% of the total of the screen size. For
example 


<HR WIDTH="50%"> 


will give this



or the SIZE attribute will make the ruler line thicker or thinner. This 
is a digit. Nothing in any definition tells me what the maximum is. Start 
at 1 and go up!


<HR SIZE=1>   gives us



<HR SIZE=2>   gives us



<HR SIZE=3>   gives us



<HR SIZE=4>   gives us



<HR SIZE=5>   gives us



<HR SIZE=6>   gives us


    One last thing to mention. If you have a location 
you think people might find useful, you can incorporate it into a
message by putting the url between the A element .... and its' closer


<A HREF="url">Identifier</A>


Where the url is replaced by whatever you might have, such as 
http://www.ccn.cs.dal.ca/~af221/party.htm and the identifier 
would be something to identify it easily and makes sense. In the case of 
the above url, you can use Party thereby rendering the line to 
send to the Chatroom as:


<A HREF="party.html">Party</A>


Party


Note.... Most of the stuff above can be put into the Nickname area to 
enhance your name.


Another thing you can do, is to put your e-mail online for people. Using 
the following:


<a href="mailto:af221@chebucto.ns.ca">Mail Me</a>


Mail Me

 



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