How do I create a link that sends me email?

Use a mailto link, for example

 

How can I have two sets of links with different colors?

You can suggest this presentation in a style sheet. First, specify colors for normal links, like this:

a:link {color: blue; background: white}
a:visited {color: purple; background: white}
a:active {color: red; background: white}

Next, identify the links that you want to have different colors. You can use the CLASS attribute in your HTML, like this:

<a class="example1" href="[URL]">[link text]</a>
Then, in your style sheet, use a selector for links with this CLASS attribute, like this:

a.example1:link {color: yellow; background: black}
a.example1:visited {color: white; background: black}
a.example1:active {color: red; background: black}

Alternatively, you can identify an element that contains the links that you want to have different colors, like this:

<div class="example2">...
<a href="[URL]">[link text]</a>...
<a href="[URL]">[link text]</a>...
<a href="[URL]">[link text]</a>...
</div>

Then, in your style sheet, use a selector for links in this containing element, like this:

.example2 a:link {color: yellow; background: black}
.example2 a:visited {color: white; background: black}
.example2 a:active {color: red; background: black}

 

How can I show HTML examples without them being interpreted as part of my document?

Within the HTML example, first replace the "&" character with "&amp;" everywhere it occurs. Then replace the "&lt;" character with "<" and the "&gt;" character with ">" in the same way.
Note that it may be appropriate to use the CODE and/or PRE elements when displaying HTML examples.

 

How do I get special characters in my HTML?

The special case of the less-than ('<'), greater-than ('>'), and ampersand ('&') characters. In general, the safest way to write HTML is in US-ASCII (ANSI X3.4, a 7-bit code), expressing characters from the upper half of the 8-bit code by using HTML entities.
Working with 8-bit characters can also be successful in many practical situations: Unix and MS-Windows (using Latin-1), and also Macs (with some reservations).
Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) is intended for English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and various other western European languages. (It is inadequate for many languages of central and eastern Europe and elsewhere, let alone for languages not written in the Roman alphabet.) On the Web, these are the only characters reliably supported. In particular, characters 128 through 159 as used in MS-Windows are not part of the ISO-8859-1 code set and will not be displayed as Windows users expect. These characters include the em dash, en dash, curly quotes, bullet, and trademark symbol; neither the actual character (the single byte) nor its �nnn; decimal equivalent is correct in HTML. Also, ISO-8859-1 does not include the Euro currency character. (See the last paragraph of this answer for more about such characters.)
On platforms whose own character code isn't ISO-8859-1, such as MS-DOS and Mac OS, there may be problems: you have to use text transfer methods that convert between the platform's own code and ISO-8859-1 (e.g., Fetch for the Mac), or convert separately (e.g., GNU recode). Using 7-bit ASCII with entities avoids those problems, but this FAQ is too small to cover other possibilities in detail.
If you run a web server (httpd) on a platform whose own character code isn't ISO-8859-1, such as a Mac or an IBM mainframe, then it's the job of the server to convert text documents into ISO-8859-1 code when sending them to the network.
If you want to use characters not in ISO-8859-1, you must use HTML 4 or XHTML rather than HTML 3.2, choose an appropriate alternative character set (and for certain character sets, choose the encoding system too), and use one method or other of specifying this.

 

Should I put quotes around attribute values?

It is never wrong to quote attribute values, and many people recommend quoting all attribute values even when the quotation marks are technically optional. XHTML 1.0 requires all attribute values to be quoted. Like previous HTML specifications, HTML 4 allows attribute values to remain unquoted in many circumstances (e.g., when the value contains only letters and digits).
Be careful when your attribute value includes double quotes, for instance when you want ALT text like "the "King of Comedy" takes a bow" for an image. Humans can parse that to know where the quoted material ends, but browsers can't. You have to code the attribute value specially so that the first interior quote doesn't terminate the value prematurely. There are two main techniques:

* Escape any quotes inside the value with &#34; so you don't terminate the value prematurely: ALT="the &#34;King of Comedy&#34; takes a bow".
* Use single quotes to enclose the attribute value: ALT='the "King of Comedy" takes a bow'.

Both these methods are correct according to the specification and are supported by current browsers, but both were poorly supported in some earlier browsers. The only truly safe advice is to rewrite the text so that the attribute value need not contain quotes, or to change the interior double quotes to single quotes, like this: ALT="the 'King of Comedy' takes a bow".

 

Posting Copy and Paste HTML

For those wanting to post direct Copy and Paste HTML on screen without the use of spaces or *s etc. and the need to explain those substitutions: Use &lt; to substitute for each opening tag < in each tagged set of HTML. Example, typing the following: &lt;a href="http://www.yourname.com">&lt;img src="http://pics.yourname.com/aw/pics/mask.gif">&lt;/a> Will show up on screen as: <a href="http://www.yourname.com"><img src="http://pics.yourname.com/aw/pics/mask.gif"></a>