in reply to More ways to download code...

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.

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Re^2: More ways to download code...
by demerphq (Chancellor) on Sep 01, 2005 at 09:36 UTC

    Can we get these things turned off on a per-user basis?

    Obviously you didn't read the root post very well. The third sentence answers your question by saying:

    If this annoys you, please visit Node Display Settings and disable it there.

    As for the problem it solves, well many people surf on small screens, and use the code wrapping support that PM provides, while this makes simple reading of the code perfectly acceptable it makes cut and pasting the code problematic. Obviously you dont have this problem, but please try to remember that we deal with users on all kind of devices, operating systems and browsers and we try to do stuff that makes most of them happy. IOW: The site isn't here just for your benefit. (Case in point obviously you don't browse the site on lynx)

    On that note, most of the respondants I've heard from like the feature, and apparently the ones that don't found the link in the root node without difficulty and turned it off.

    ---
    $world=~s/war/peace/g

[reply]
      As for the problem it solves, well many people surf on small screens, and use the code wrapping support that PM provides
      Not to mention some of us have line numbering turned on (which is what I actually assumed it was addressing)

      -- Argel
[reply]

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