The basic difference between BBCode and HTML is that while HTML uses < and > to surround tags, BBCode requires that you use [ and ]. Once you realize that, it's pretty smooth sailing.

For example, bold text is produced with text to have in bold, while italics is generated with and and underlining (which is still a bad idea on a Web page, even in BBCode) is done with and .

Font color and size changes are accomplished with deprecated HTML "font" tag attributes: text in red turns some text red, for example. You can also specify the hexidecimal color equivalent if you're a purist (that is, use [color=#ccff00]), and text size can be specified as a value of 1..29, where 1=very small text and 29=really big text.