The next commands that we will look at are the text manipulation commands. These commands allow you to do almost anything with a HTML document that you can do with a word processor. Using these commands you can make text appear in italics or make text bold. These commands can be useful if you want to put titles of magazine articles, emphasize words, or transfer an essay that you wrote that contains these types of text manipulations already in it on to the internet. Using these commands can provide some flavor to your web page. Looking at a web page that is all text and contains no manipulation of the text seems very boring. If you are looking at a document that is all yet that contains some manipulation it will make a page look more interesting, even if your page is a informative page about the cellular structure of fungus :)
In order to insert text manipulation into your web page you must first decide what text you want the manipulation to occur on. On my page, I put manipulation of words that describe the link in the picture. For example, if you visit my page you will see a list of the sections that you can go to. Each section is signaled by a graphic but if you are not familiar with what was being discussed in the section then you will have no way to know what is in the section without going to it. In order to solve this problem I put the Operating System’s name that the link is going to lead to next to the picture of the Operating System. But how you manipulate the text to spice up your page is up to you and all circumstances are different. Let’s just for example say that on your page you wanted to write a essay on the Oedipus Cycle. In order to be grammatically correct you would want to italize the words Oedipus Cycle because they are the title of a series of books. In order to do this you would first need to insert the signal to begin the italics which is an angle bracket “<“ then the letter I then another angle bracket “>”. Then you would insert the words that you wished to be italized. Then you would insert the command that ends the italics and reverts the text thereafter into normal text. This command is an angle bracket “<“ followed by a slash “/” followed by a I then you would insert an angle bracket “>”. The final source code for this with a little bit of writing before and after the command:
The <I>Oedipus Cycle</I> was written by Sophocles.
The bold command can be used to emphasize words. If a person is skimming your page for important information the bold words will stick out and catch there eye. Let’s say you were talking about all of the people in your family because you have an about the author section on your web page. You want to make the relationship of the people in your family bold but you want there name not to be. This way if the person wants to know about your brother they would be able to skim your document for the word brother. In order to start the bold command you must insert an angle bracket “<“ followed by the letter B followed by an angle bracket “>”. Then you would insert the text that you want to be bold. Then you would end that command with an angle bracket “<“ followed by a slash “/” followed by a B then an angle bracket “>”. The final source code for this document would look like:
My <B>Brother</B> is a very successful business man.
Another option is to make items bold and italics at the same time. For example, if you wanted to talk about your favorite book (Which of course is this book :) and you wanted the name to stick out. But, because it is the name of the book it should be italized. The final source code for this would look like this:
My favorite book is <I><B>The Pocket Guide to HTML 3.0</B></I>.
NOTE: It does not matter what order you put multiple commands in, they will still function the same.
