How does one write a spoiler and then cover it with black etc?
How does one quote a portion of another post in his own post?
Probably very simple but so is my computer knowledge.
Use a [spoiler] tag.
Either click on the Reply button at the bottom of the post (not the Post Reply at the bottom of the thread), or use a
[quote]
tag and copy/paste the quoted text in.
Cheat sheet for vBulletin codes is here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/misc.php?do=bbcode This page is also available through the link at the bottom-left of the reply page. Click the test that says, “vB code” is on."
[symbol]abcdef[/symbol]
[thread=239396]Thread link[/thread] [post=4513725]post link[/post]
Highlighted text
Cool! 
Learn something new every day. Unfortunately, the [symbol] doesn’t display properly in Opera, and neither does the ! or the C‚. 
It seems to be a problem with Opera, though, not with the SDMB.
And it took 15 minutes to post this from IE. :mad:
[rant]
It’s a problem with the fact that IE stupidly allows a nonstandard encoding (to wit, various dingbat fonts) if it’s specified in a font tag. The Opera rendering is correct.
[/rant]
I still don’t understand what’s wrong with a browser rendering a page the way the HTML says to. If a page specifies to use the font called “dingbat”, and the user has a font called “dingbat” installed, then what’s the problem? I can understand complaining about the use of nonstandard fonts if they’re unlikely to be found on a typical user’s machine, but most of the graphical fonts are fairly universal now.
It’s part of a bigger issue. Font families are properly “style” as opposed to “content”. Distinction between style and content is one of the biggest overlying philosophies that separates accessible, user-friendly webpages from the other 99.9% of the web. 
Making an “a” into an “alpha” is a content-based use, so you shouldn’t use font families to do it; there is an accessible way.
If you don’t agree with it, that’s fine, but that’s the reason, yo. Web Content Accessibility Guideline #3.
Probably just repeating your cite here (which is long so I’ll read it later) but according to my HTML book the original HTML specification wasn’t intended to be so specific, e.g. one would specify a monospace serif font rather than Courier New. (Is that what you mean by style and content?) But until the HTML specification is extended to include characters like “city” and “spider”, I don’t agree with it.
Sorry for the hijack though.
But then again, another Big Philosophy for HTML is that it should be both forward and backward compatible. Given that there was a time when any named font was allowed, I think that that should be made the official standard, so as to encompass older browsers which were (at the time) standards-compliant. But as it is currently, a symbol font ‘a’ will produce an alpha in Netscape Navigator 3.0, and an alpha escape sequence will produce an alpha in Mozilla, but there is no single method which will work for both browsers. I suppose I would have preferred to have the escape sequences available from the get-go, or possibly some way to embed TeX into HTML (which would give you a lot more formatting power than any version of HTML), but it’s too late now to re-write history.