Instructions:Emphasis & Formatting

This activity is for introducing basic text markup tags. The marked-up text is sandwiched between the specific tag and the browser interprets how to present the tagged text. A few of the tags as described in the green box work like so:

Don't sweat these details, you don't really have to know them! The students can always check out the source code of the activity page to see the tags in action.

Also, students may want to experiment with using "comments." Comments are included in code exclusively for human readers of that code, and hence are frequently used to explain the workings of a program or its trickier pieces.

In HTML, comments are designated by writing:

Whatever text you put in a comment tag will not show up in the outputted HTML page but will appear in the HTML code. Hence, the activity asks for students to create "Redacted Poetry" out of some anthology excerpts by commenting out certain words and making a poem out of what's left.

Students might also choose to change the font color to the same as the background instead of commenting out their words, which is useful if the student wants to make certain text invisible while retaining line breaks, spacing, and other formatting information.

Troubleshooting Tips:

Click here for some examples for this activity:

Some examples of redacted poems made from the Bush excerpts using comments and white font color:

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