h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have to admit that I only use the preview if I'm unsure whether I've used the right code for a smiley!

Well then it's high time you started using preview to check content and meaning as well, PF

No comment!

I have to confess I only use preview for checking smileys as well. Or if I've written a very long post and want to see how long it actually runs on the page, before I post it.

I prefer the idea of being able to edit the post until someone replies. THis could be used to great advantage in volatile conversations - if someone has posted something that's practically an incitement to violence, and then comes back, say, a half-hour later, sees no one's replied, but thinks that maybe that heated comment wasn't justified, they could change it, and perhaps an entire flame war could be avoided.

Let me just say now that, overall, this site has one of the highest standards of speech that I've ever seen. I visit a lot of sites intended for teenagers, and their level of speech can, frankly, be quite impenetrable. Even without an 'edit' feature it's a joy to participate in h2g2's high level of intelligibility.

How about a timeless edit feature, except every edited post has a link that says "View original post" ? that would make it so you can't rewrite history /perminantly/ but you can avoid having that stupid thing you wish you hadn't said paraded in front of everybody 4ever.

I don't see what would be so bad about "rewriting history" really. it would kind of make h2g2 more about what people think /now/ more than an archive that is being continually added to.
Nerd42

I don't really agree, I'm afraid. I'd prefer to have an archive I could look through, to see who said what when. And speaking very personally, as a kid who's constantly changing and doing different stuff and all, it's great to be able to look back at what I said a year ago and think about how I've changed since then.

Besides, if you can 'rewrite history', look at what would happen:

In scenario 1, Person A calls Person B on a racist attitude they've consistently shown in posts. Person B claims they never said anything racist. Person A says 'Yes you did!' and produces posts to prove it.

In scenario 2, the same thing happens, except Person A doesn't have any posts to prove it because Person B went back and changed them all. And even if Person A goes back and looks at the original posting, newbies might not be aware that you could do that, and so could get the wrong impression of Person B's character.

Nerd42, there is saying around here, "preview is your friend".

What'd I do?

A while ago, I got an error message from h2g2 that said: "The following error has occured: An unkonwn error has occured."
Nerd42

I preview nearly every time, and then edit the mistakes, and then still spot mistakes once I've posted.

Exactly. I don't usually spot errors even if I do preview. If I return to the thread a few minutes later, though, I no longer have what I intended to write in my head, so I can read what I actually wrote.
Does that make sense?:/

Traveller in Time unconventional in everything
"It does make sense, although you would probably only reread whatever you just posted if someone points you on the diverted context in the next posting.

Life is not perfect, as are our wordings. Well, you will have something to talk about in the end. "

I never preview, and consequently I feel that I have no right to be angry about mistakes I make.

So any joy on getting "Bold, Italic and Underline" in forums then Jim?

Compare posts 8 and 13.

Post 8 containes a < quote > tag which now appears but, from the evidence in my memory and in the following posts, didn't originally.

Post 13 contains, I think < quote > text </ quote >, which doesn't appear.

There have obviously been some software changes since I last looked at this thread.



On another point, if some form of markup was introduced, would it be applied retrospectively? There might be a certain amount of minor chaos if *text with asterisks* suddenly became bold. Their authors might not have intended them that way. And yet most changes are retrospective. For example, postings which contained < rolleyes > written before that smiley was introduced now have .

If GuideML was enabled, even as a restricted subset, I can see other problems with the XML parser. It wouldn't like normal smiley codes. And having to use the GuideML versions would be a pain.

TRiG.<smiley type="smiley"/>

Woo! How interesting, the quote thing works

I'll have to wait until tomorrow and the 606 board reopens to work out the syntax as to how to force the userid bit into a quote tag to see if works fully here on h2g2. My guess is that it won't, but that we might get some interesting results.

As to retrospective oddities, well there is no way of avoiding the problem: it is going to happen unless the markup is well thought through. Were you around when the smiley was introduced with the shortcode of 'o-o'? For a couple of days it certainly made 'cperation' amongst others look a bit weird

I still think that "italic" "bold" and "Underline" would be usefull here but anything else might end up being a bit much.

Bold and Italic - yes please!

Underline? no thanks... well not for me...




Jim, post 7 << We should find out how GMail does it.>>

Fingers crossed!

The (other) 'Gmail-style' features I'd like to see here are;

• The QUOTE button
• Unordered lists¹
• Indentation
• Hyperlinks


________________________________________________

¹ I doubt if Ordered (numbered) lists would be used that often

GMail will almost certainly do it by using the contenteditable=true attribute on an HTML element, which will start up the MSHTML editor which can edity just about anything - if you can fathom how to program it. I don't know how GMail works with browsers other than IE, but there looks like a lot of down and dirty DHTML stuff going on.

The fact the GMail works perfectly with Firefox means there's a workable HTML editor somewhere in Firefox as well.