A. The good news is, it's probably not lost forever, just hidden somewhere. Most likely, you left one of your tags without a mate (a closing tag); this could cause all of the entries following not to be rendered (in other words, they're still there, just not showing).

HTML tags are sociable types -- they almost always travel in pairs. So, if you want to make your entry BOLD, you open it with the <B> tag and close it with the </B> tag. Basically, anything you open with a TAG, you should close with the matching /TAG.

Another hint is to always "BACK OUT the way you came in." In other words, when you put in several tags, you need to close them in reverse order. For example, if you want to change the font size, and make the type bold, and make it italic as well, this might be the order:

<FONT SIZE=+1><B><I>YOUR TEXT HERE</I></B></FONT>

As for your Guestbook experience, don't worry, these things happen. The thing to do is e-mail the site owner and let him or her know about it. Guestbooks generally won't let you back in to edit an entry after you've submitted it, so there's no way you can fix it yourself, but the site owner can go in and add the missing tag or delete the offending code. Don't worry -- everyone makes mistakes (even me! -- see below).

Q. Dudette, you said we can't FTP with a WebTV, but I'm listening to music from an FTP site right now!

A. Honey, you are absolutely right. We can access content from an FTP site, as long as it's something WebTV can handle, like MIDI, .au, or pictures. What we can't do is copy files down to storage and (what we really want) FTP files up from storage to our web sites. Mea culpa for the incomplete explanation.

Q. No more MPEG audio for me! It takes such a long time for it to download, and then it's just a few seconds long. Same with .au, so why does MIDI take such a short time and play so long? And it sounds so much better, too!

A. The reason MIDI comes down so fast is that it is in a symbolic form (sort of a "digital sheet music") which the MIDI player inside the WebTV box interprets and turns into music. The MIDI player in the WebTV is especially good -- much better, in fact, than in most PCs.

On the other hand, MPEG and .au are digitized sound waves, just about the biggest user of data bandwidth except for video. RealAudio is digitized, but is compressed into a special low-bandwidth format and then "streamed" (a small amount of the file is downloaded into a buffer, and then it plays from the buffer while the rest comes down). The problems with it are that it isn't very pleasing for quality music, and WebTV currently only supports the RealAudio 2.0 format (3.0 is better, and is most of what you'll find on the Web). Here's hoping for RealAudio 3.0 in the next upgrade!

Q. When I'm browsing and see a yellow rectangle on a word group, I can then access more detailed info. But with Usenet, a red rectangle appears and it can't be accessed. Why is WebTV not allowed to access Usenet?

A. Don't you just hate those locked doors, with no "drink me" around to make you small enough to go through the keyhole. (Sorry, been around Alice too much recently. )

The reason that you can't get Usenet with the WebTV (yet) is that there is no news server that supplies the service to us. A news server is actually a different sort of service (using NNTP instead of HTTP protocols), and it also requires a news reader to be part of the client (browser software in your WebTV box). We've heard rumors that newsgroups (Usenet) may be in a future upgrade, but we haven't been able to confirm them.