In the first place I don't like excessive formatting. And indeed it seems to me that only a restricted subset of tags is really needed. For example <code> tags for... ehm... code, and then if you don't know that <em> is for emphasizing, who cares? You can still use ASCII-like emphasizing, a' la "_emphasizing_". You may learn gradually how to improve the visual appearance of your posts. Chances are that other monks will help you doing so.

For example often newbies want to stress that, say, if or for are keywords and do so by writing "IF" and "FOR" respectively. When I saw someone doing so I either /msg'ed them or included in my reply (if any) the recommendation to use inline <code> or <c> tags.

Then there are the linking shortcuts. I didn't know any in the beginning. I may have read the docs in the first place, but they seemed to me overly complex at first. I discovered them when indavertently writing [snip] in a quotation. Then I checked PerlMonks FAQ and I learned how to use them.

In short: KISS. And learn gradually!

If you dig around in Super Search, you'll see this has come up often.

Personally, I think the biggest problem is that no-one has come forward to champion the attempt to add such a system, ie one of the pmdev or gods, and until that happens, we're not going to get any improvements in that direction.

C.

Personally, I think the biggest problem is that no-one has come forward to champion the attempt to add such a system, ie one of the pmdev or gods, and until that happens, we're not going to get any improvements in that direction.

Ive been hoping that some bright spark will figure out a way to do this from the freenodelet and tell us about it so we can just merge it into the system. If this is going to be a JS solution (IMO it should be) then there is no need for PMDEV to participate until someone has done an implementation in the freenodelet that works well with at least one of our input forms.

OTOH I agree that if a god or pmdevil decided that doing this was important (and not just nice to have) it would be done already but the truth is there is no need for us to do it first, the nature of the problem allows any user to implement a solution.

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