Formatting Text for Content Managers

HTML and XHTML Coding

Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and it’s more easy to get along with cousin, XHTML (the X is for Extensible), is the language of the web. As far as computer languages go, it is fairly easy to learn and very forgivable. However, to insure that traditional and non-traditional browsers alike can interpret the code, follow these guidelines.

Paragraphs
Do: <p>All text needs an opening and closing tag of some sort. The most common is the paragraph tag.</p>
Don't: All text needs an opening and closing tag of some sort. The most common is the paragraph tag.<br><br>

Boldface Text
Do: Type to be <strong>boldfaced here.</strong>
Don’t: Type to be <B>boldfaced here.</B>

Text in Italics
Do: Type to be <em>italic here.</em>
Don’t: Type to be <I>italic here.</I>

Titles and Subheads
Do: Remember to include paragraph tags for any text that follows these titles and subheads.
<h1>Large, page titles</h1>
<h3>Subhead within text</h3>
<h5>Minor subheads within text</h5>
<h6>Special subheads or navigation aids within text</h6>

Unordered (bulleted) Lists
<ul>
<li>List item 1</li>
<li>List item 1</li>
<li>List item 1</li>
</ul>

Ordered (numbered) Lists
<ol>
<li>List item 1</li>
<li>List item 1</li>
<li>List item 1</li>
</ol>

Email links
<a href=”mailto:youremailhere@crcna.org”>Click here</a> to contact us.

Page links
<a href=”http://www.crcna.org/index.asp”>Click here</a> to see the front page.
Note: Some pages within the same section of the content manager can be referred to by relative links and include just the linked page name (e.g. 2005jun10_readme.cfm)

Character Sets

Because character sets vary between applications and computer platforms, if you are getting funky characters in your text, follow these steps:

Create your content in Word (or use an existing Word document).
Copy and paste the content into a (html) text editor like BBedit (Mac) or Notepad (Windows).
In your html editor, choose "convert to ASCII" which will convert all your formatted characters into plain text.
Copy and paste the properly formatted text into your content manager.

Another way to get around character set problems is to save as Text Only or Text Without Line Breaks in Word. Close the file and reopen it. It will now appear as text format. Note that it is essential to close and reopen the document before copying or you’re back to the Word character set.