CREATING YOUR FIRST POST - WordPress in Depth - page 82

II

Using Basic Formatting Commands
WordPress makes it easy for you to use core HTML formatting commands. It only allows you to use
a small subset of the formatting commands that are available in a full-featured word processor such
as Microsoft Word. It doesn't allow you to do page layout at all. (You can try, but your page layouts
will look ugly in the highly formatted WordPress themes, and the specific “look” you tried so hard
to achieve will break down in different browsers and on various devices.)
The point, though, is not to think about what WordPress can't do, but about what it can do. The
following list describes the core formatting capabilities, all HTML-based, that WordPress makes
available to you:

•

Bold, italic, and strikethrough —Use these simple text formatting commands
judiciously, but use them.

•

Bulleted lists and numbered lists —These are usually displayed in a somewhat ugly
way in a web browser, but are still very important for breaking up long blocks of text, as we've
done in this topic.

•

Blockquotes —Blockquotes are usually displayed in an ugly way in web browsers as well,
but they're an accepted way to call out quoted text.

•

Left-, center-, and right-justification —Most text in web pages is left-justified,
also called “ragged right,” as is the text in this topic. Centered text is good for captions. Right-
justified text is often used to set out a comment or for attempts at complicated page layouts.

That's it: nine options, the entire set of commonly used HTML formatting commands that
WordPress makes available in its main formatting menu.
Even among this limited set of commands, blogs traditionally don't use all of them. The name
Word Press is no accident—bloggers tend to take their cues from traditional newspaper and maga-
zine journalists, who use words, not formatting or images, as their tool for communicating.
Traditional journalists often submit their stories in text form and don't see how the story will look
when laid out until after the story is published. Just think: Highly paid, famous journalists have less
control than you do in WordPress!
Why do bloggers use even the limited formatting available in HTML so little? The reasons vary.
Using bold , along with using ALL CAPS, is often considered to be shouting by bloggers. Italic
looks better in print than on computer screens, due to screens' low resolution. Strikethrough, how-
ever, is sometimes seen in blogs, where it has developed an ironic use (see the Tip describing
strikethroughs in the section “Using Hyperlinks as Formatting,” later in this chapter).
In blogs, bulleted lists are used rarely—too rarely, we would say—and numbered lists are often
reserved for numbered steps, which are rare in blogging. Blockquotes are common, though they
could be used more, given how much blogs refer to other texts.
As for the three types of justification (left-, center-, and right-justification), most blogs are left-
justified (ragged right), unlike a lot of print journalism, which is usually fully justified, with both left
and right margins flush.