What is BBCode? What are the differences between HTML and BBCode?

I have seen lot of forums that require postings be written in BBCode rather than HTML.

The main reason, must be so that there is some control over people not adding unauthorized links (like including pictures from unaffiliated Web sites) because it doesn't seem that much easier than HTML when you look at the two.

The basic differences between BBCode and HTML is that HTML uses <> two surround tags, BBCode requires that you use [ and ]. For example:

Bold text is produced with [b] text to have in bold[/b],

While italics is generated with [i] and [/i] and

Underlining is done with [u] and [/u].

Font color and size changes are accomplished with deprecated HTML "font" tag attributes: [color=red]text in red[/color] turns some text red, for example. You can also use the hexadecimal color equivalent (that is, use [color=#00ff00]), and text size can be specified as a value (that is, use [size=1]).

There are two ways you can show a hypertext reference in BBCode. The easiest is to use a URL tag. To point to this Web site, for example, you'd use this: [url]http://mytechlearning.blogspot.com/[/url]. If you want to display a name instead of the actual URL, use this: [url=http://mytechlearning.blogspot.com/]My Tech Learning[/url].

There is also special code listing blocks denoted with [code] and [/code]. Within these two tags, all <> symbols are translated into their displayable equivalent (the HTML character entities < and >) so that you can share HTML code with other members of the forum like in tek-tips forums .

As in HTML, you can combine multiple tags in a sequence if you want. Just make sure that you always close links from innermost to outermost, just like parentheses in your English writing!