Formatting the title of an Announcement or a bibliographic item -- basic HTML code:

Let's say you want a formatted title for an announcement, e.g. "Important: Please read this", in your Blackboard course, centered and in bold.
In your Blackboard course, go to Control Panel, Announcement, Add item. And in the text box, type

<center><b>Important: Please read this</b></center>

then press Enter to go the next line and type your announcement.

<center> is the command for centering selected text, </center> is the command to stop centering
<b> is the command for bold selected text, </b> is the command to stop bolding

Let's say you want a formatted bibliographic item for your Blackboard course:
In your Blackboard course, go to Control Panel, Announcement or whatever, Add item.
In the text box, type

<center><b>Books:</b></center>   add <br> [like Enter to go to the next line] and type

author's last name, first name. <i>book title</i>. publisher, year. ISBN #

or

author's last name, first name. <u>book title</u>. publisher, year. ISBN #

then add <br> [like Enter to go to the next line] and type your next item.

The code <i> title </i> italicizes the title of the book, for the web for indicating the title of a printed book in italics.
The code <u> title </u> underlines the title of the book, required by publishers for italicizing the title.

The basics of HTML code:

You might want to open a new file in Netscape Composer and  type testing
then highlight/select this text, and bold and center it by clicking on the respective icons on the formatting bar.
Then click on View, HTML source (v. 4.7 has this on the Edit menu). You will see the following basic code:

<><!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
<html>
<head>
   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
   <meta name="Author" content="Ursula Hoffmann">
   <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.75 [en]C-CCK-MCD NSCPCD475  (Win98; U) [Netscape]">
   <title>html_basics</title>
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#CCCCCC" link="#0000EE" vlink="#551A8B" alink="#006600">
<center><b><font size=+2>Formatting the title of an Announcement or a bibliographic item -- basic HTML code:</font></b></center>
</body>
  
Explanations:
HTML sections are bracketed with angle brackets, <...> to indicate start and </...> to indicate end. (Note the / that signals end of code.)
They may be  nested.
The <!doctype ...> section is added by your computer.
The main section is between <html> and </html>.
The header section within the main section (<head> to </head> is added by your computer. Make sure to use your name as author when you format your page.
Your text is in the body text section, <body text....> to </body>.

The formatting code here has the colors for this page: body text black, background color gray, the default link colors for untouched, selected, or visited link.
The additional code for the body text in this example is <center><b><font size> ... </font></b></center> for center and bold.


A few common tags:

start
 end
 meaning
 example
<b>
 </b>
 bold
 <b>bolded text</b>
<i>
 </i>
 italics
 <b>italic text</b>
<u>
 <u>
 underline
 <b>underlined text</b>
<center>
 </center>
 center
 <b>centered text</b>
<h3>
 </h3>
 heading 3
 <b>medium large text</b>
<br>
force a break to next line






add image
 <img src="image filename">


add link
 <a href="http://website.com">link text</a>