Hmm, and you believe that the tone of your post is going to give anonymonk a warm, fuzzy feeling and actually want to register? (for those tuning in late, Yve's orginal words were "Your post looks like crap", or words to that effect).
It would have been better to just signal the janitors to get them to come over and clean up. It's evident that the poster saw the absence of WYSIWYG, and, human frailty being what it is, glossed over the part about the tips.
For this kind of thing to occur so often leads me to believe that there is a grain of truth in what Jakob Nielsen has to say, the design of the site is in error, not the user.
I think the heart of the problem is that most newcomers to the site don't realise that they must write in HTML or perish. While I have only marginal sympathy for a user of a techical site such as PM to understand naught about HTML, I can fully appreciate that there are any number of people who have either the time or inclination to learn it. It's our loss if they have a valuable contribution which is ignored.
When you are post anything here, there is absolutely no indication at all which suggests that you must use HTML, there is only the tips link. Maybe the Slash plain text/html/extrans method needs to be used. That has the advantage of being understood across a broader range of sites.
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UPDATE
I have posted a patch to improve the hints that are provided, and an article about it to New hints..... I really welcome any comments regarding it.
Well. I suppose my tone comes across wrong. That was meant to sound friendly, but on rereading I can see your point. OTOH there are a variety of posts that I suspect come from this individual, and yes I did consider at least one (please see Nodes To Consider). Since it seemed like this was the same person I felt it was worth pointing out
that there are markup tools available on the site.
Also, as a second thought when you read this site its pretty clear that is possible to write a well formatted post, so when he saw that his wasnt well formatted it should have been clear that he was missing something. It may be that the advice needs to be clearer (I would say that legal tags should be listed above the text box, per user settings but thats another debate) but either way posting something that looks like that to me is just an indication of lazyness and the wrong kind of lazyness, like leaving out strictures cause its too much typing.
Yves / DeMerphq
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When to use Prototypes?
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