This is not terribly high tech (not everything has to be ) but twice in a week a blogger and a webmaster ask what’s wrong with their blog entry or web page because right after they entered a new blog post or web page, their layout is all messed up. Upon inspecting the source code, the common culprit was - the underscore.

Not just one but a whole series of them in succession - apparently they used the underscores to create a separator line so their content looks more readable. There is a very basic HTML code you can use for a separator line and it won’t mess up your layout. I know this is rudimentary to many of you but I’m guessing some bloggers aren’t used to HTML since many blog applications have nice WYSISYG interfaces. Anyway, if you want a separator line, in your source use <hr /> instead. If you’re using Wordpress, you can simply add <hr /> in the post area since it doesn’t have a WYSIWYG posting interface.