2013-10-18 How to format blogger comments

There are quite a few blogs based on (the principles) of blogger.com.

As a visitor you can read the articles aka. posts,
in many cases you can also add your own comments to those posts,
sometimes even anonymously - not using an account.

If you have commented on blogger posts, you probably know you can structure your input
using line breaks - at least that was the case on the blogger sites I have visited up to now.

There is another feature of those blogger sites, that is perhaps not yet that widely known:
You can use a limited set of HTML code to format your comments.

The features and their HTML codes to use, I have found so far, are:

• bold text: <b>bold text</b>
• italic text: <i>italic text</i>
• hyperlinks: sandbox: <a href="http://sandbox993.blogspot.com/">sandbox</a>

If you type into your comment: "<b>bold text</b>" the result will be displayed as "bold text".
...

The characters "<", ">" and "&" (sometimes) take on special meaning in your comments text,
so that what is displayed is different to what you typed - like in the above features.

To be able to get those combinations actually displayed, you need "workarounds".
Actually those are just more "special features" - text combinations that are treated as HTML.

The ones you may need for that purposes may be:

• "&lt;" is displayed as "<",
• "&gt;" is displayed as ">",
• "&amp;" is displayed as "&".

So you can type: "&lt;b&gt;bold words<&lt;/b&gt;"
and it will be displayed as: "<b>bold words</b>" - not making anything bold this time.


As this is a blogger site and it's name is sandbox, you may test those features in the comments to this post. :)