Why is it that postings in these fora recognize some HTML tags but not others? Are only specific tags allowed by the UBB software, or are they Webmaster-selected options?

Do any of you Saints know all of the allowed tags?

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-Art

To my (limited) knowledge, HTML tags are permitted - which ones don't seem to work?

HTML tags are NOT allowed in the signature, but by editing a message, any HTML tags in the signature are 'activated'.

I haven't tried all the tags, but < q > < /q > did not work when I mistakenly used them in place of the UBB [ quote ] [ /quote ].

I put spaces in the tags above on purpose so they will show up in this posting. I did not use the spaces in the tags that I had trouble with.

The forum software parses raw HTML tags in messages, translates them into something it understands, then writes the result back as HTML. The reason the forum software doesn't understand every HTML tag is because it only understands those that it parses, that is, those that it was designed to understand.

For the most part these are common formatting tags. As we've learned earlier, it has a real hard time with Tables and does a v. poor job in parsing those - although it tries.

Why did the UBB authors do things they way they did. I suppose so the vast majority of their users didn't have to learn to write HTML. The little UBB tags done with square brackets are their concession to the folks who still feel the need to have special markup capabilities for their messages. But without some of the arcanity of HTML.


It also allow the forum software's authors to proceed with development at their own pace. HTML is a fairly rapidly changing standard and I doubt there are two browsers that implement it the same way. (IE and Navigator certainly don't).

If there's an HTML tag you really really need to use, you might try urging the UBB author's to incorporate recognition of it in a new release of their software.

Rgds,
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/im

Thanks Tim. I wouldn't consider *any* html tags essential in this context. I stumbled upon this situation and was just curious as to why some were accepted and others not. Thanks again for the explanation; that's good enough for me.

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-Art