RE: Monkifying posts is too rough (solution, not rant :)

I think it's a bad UI decision to usurp both angle brackets and square brackets. Why not let angle brackets do double duty:

  This is a link to <link to="merlyn">. --- like [merlyn]
  This is a link to <link to="merlyn" text="merlyn's home page"> --- l
+ike [merlyn|merlyn's home page]
[download]

I really hate having to remember to type special chars for brackets.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Comment on RE: Monkifying posts is too rough (solution, not rant :) Download Code

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Changing the Everything engine (was RE: RE: Monkifying posts is too rough (solution, not rant :)) by Corion (Patriarch) on Jun 17, 2000 at 02:44 UTC
Uhoh - you propose a change down in the guts of the Everything engine `:)`. While it would surely be the Right Thing, I guess that won't happen, because many things in the Everything engine are hardcoded to use [ and ] for evaluation. I also think that non-HTML-knowing people find it easier to put a link into square brackets instead of learning HTML syntax (though it would maybe be a good thing to force HTML syntax unto the people `:)`). I think you will be welcome to submit patches to the engine that parse <LINK ...> tags in a special way, but I don't see that square-bracket-linking will go away soon ...	[reply]

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Changing the Everything engine (was RE: RE: Monkifying posts is too rough (solution, not rant :))
by Corion (Patriarch) on Jun 17, 2000 at 02:44 UTC

Uhoh - you propose a change down in the guts of the Everything engine :). While it would surely be the Right Thing, I guess that won't happen, because many things in the Everything engine are hardcoded to use [ and ] for evaluation. I also think that non-HTML-knowing people find it easier to put a link into square brackets instead of learning HTML syntax (though it would maybe be a good thing to force HTML syntax unto the people :)).

I think you will be welcome to submit patches to the engine that parse <LINK ...> tags in a special way, but I don't see that square-bracket-linking will go away soon ...

[reply]