After having seen my screen real-estate eaten up a bit by these little download tags, I'm trying to figure out the problem that this is solving.

When I wanted the entire code for a node, I simply hit that big download button.

When I wanted just a snippet, I must be the most talented web user on the planet, because it's trivial for me to just (a) highlight a section of the text on my screen, (b) select "copy", (c) go to my text editor, and (d) press "paste".

Now, even though I had an easy method to get the whole doc and get any portion of the doc, I now have sometimes upwards of 4 or 5 more lines of screen real-estate taken up, for no apparent reason, because it's actually harder to have it pop up a new window or screen and go find that, just again to do the cut-n-paste there instead.

So, again, what problem is this solving for people? Can we get these things turned off on a per-user basis? Or even better, can we get these things turned off for everyone until this is somehow explained as being better for everyone overall?

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

update: Thanks for pointing out that there is a per-user setting to disable tags. I will disagree that it should have been set off by default. When you make sweeping changes, you should have them be opt-in, not opt-out.

In reply to Re: More ways to download code... by merlyn
in thread More ways to download code... by demerphq

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.