I agree, but you can make it bigger using CSS. In my Display Settings

Can you, as Anonymous Monk?

I generally use the It's All Text! extension for Firefox, then I can click the "edit" button on any textarea and modify it in my own editor.

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andrew

No, not without GreaseMonkey or some other external tool. That's why I said I agree with that recommendation.

No, not without GreaseMonkey or some other external tool.

You can rather easily do this in IE and it is only somewhat more complicated in FireFox. Sure, it may impact any textarea on any web site that uses name="note_doctext", but how many of those are you likely to run into? (And, yes, it is no accident that posting anonymously has some disadvantages.)

For IE, select Tools => Internet Options => General => Accessibility and define your personal style sheet and add the appropriate CSS to it. For FireFox, look up the FAQ on how to find you profile directory and which file to edit and add your personal CSS to.

If somebody would make some exact recommendation as to how to improve the default textarea size, then it would be more likely that something would be done. Especially if the recommendation was not solely geared toward people with the latest browser being used maximized on a high-resolution monitor. :)

- tye        

I suspect the horse may be dead from all this flogging, but here goes...

About those open-P and close-P tags:

Just about every note I have written here has a similar history:

• Position at start of text area above my sig;
• type first 'para';
• type Enter-Enter;
• type next para;

Now there are a couple or three places in this thread where venerable members of the Monastery have said words like (my apologies, I'm not au fait enough to do the linking trick)

Just put a <p> at the beginning of every paragraph

you just need <p> for paragraphs and <code>...</code> for code

So I have had a little follow-on question: how strict/forgiving are the "PM HTML recommendations", specifically with regard to whether the closing tags are required?

Update: I followed the recommendation in Markup in the Monastery to maximise my HTML 'error reporting', and that went some way to answering the question. It seems that:

• if I omit an initial <p> I am forgiven but the next </p> is, unsurprisingly, flagged;
• the Monastery markup does prefer writers to close paras with a proper </p> tag but tolerates those who don't use one.

So although I think I don't have the question I had when I started, I shall leave this post here as it may help others in a similar situation; and may act as a recommendation to turn on that HTML check in your Display Settings!

So I have had a little follow-on question: how strict/forgiving are the "PM HTML recommendations", specifically with regard to whether the closing tags are required?

Closing a P element is done implicitly in the absence of closing tag, both in HTML and on PerlMonks. I've never had a problem there. On the other hand, I've had problems omitting closing tags for table-related elements on PerlMonks, even though it was valid HTML.

Considering that the HTML DTD specifically allows the close tag of the P element to be optional (on the account that the close tag can be inferred), I'm surprised the recommendation here is to use the close tag. That sounds very un-Perlish - and more Pythonesque.

Not that I ever do ;-) (Nor do I use close tags for LI)

Surprised me too.

I think I will turn down my error reporting level again ;-)

Reminds me of the apocryphal stories about turning off 'use strict;' to make the errors go away ;-)

This signature will be ready by Christmas

XHTML requires them, while HTML leaves them optional. Perlmonks seems to use transitional, in HTML mode. Which means it should be ok, in theory.

That said, the interactions between them and a several of the other HTML tags that are allowed here can get fairly complex, and it is not always obvious — even with the spec — which way they are supposed to be resolved.

Consider them something that use warnings; will complain about. ;)

you just need <p> for paragraphs and <code>...</code> for code

I'm replying to you because you're just the first one (from a search POV, top-to-bottom) to point out so, and it's fundamentally true: I would call it the zeroeth-order approximation to the Truth™ ;) Now, to be admittedly fussy and since nobody else seems to have mentioned them yet, I would add that before any other "cosmetic" tag would come PM-specific <readmore> and (to a lesser extent) <spoiler> ones which are sometimes recommended, to define the first-order approximation.

As for the level of strictness at the monastery, I don't have time enough to follow the subthread(s?) that this issue spawned, but as far as I'm concerned I close all tags: indeed I'm pretty much always writing xhtml nowadays, whenever I have to "write *html" that is - I feel more comfortable and psychologically at ease. And it's not tiresome for me in any way. You may check that by inspecting the xml source of my nodes, well at least since some years on...

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If you can't understand the incipit, then please check the IPB Campaign.