Being picky about comment format November 7, 2001 9:07 PM   Subscribe

Good, bad or ugly? He basically changed the formatting of his comment. Is this acceptable? Can I make my comments any width I'd like? Why do bad things happen to good people?
posted by geoff. to MetaFilter-Related at 9:07 PM (14 comments total)

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posted by obiwanwasabi at 9:24 PM on November 7, 2001


He's probably copy and pasting his stuff from an email app or just being a moron and typing return at the end of every line as if MetaFilter is a big typewriter.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:33 PM on November 7, 2001


Oh my... No offense, but don't we really have bigger issues to worry about?
posted by fooljay at 12:12 AM on November 8, 2001


the textarea spans 60 characters and his sentences break after about 66 or so characters, so I don't think he's hitting return at the end of every line as he's typing it into the form box (unless people get different size text boxes).

in any case, it doesn't seem like a big deal. that person is not an evil-doer.
posted by gluechunk at 12:47 AM on November 8, 2001


If you write responses in, say, emacs, and then cut+paste, this is what you see. For long posts this is what I do (the text area in NN6.1 is flakey) (and I use NN6.1 because it's the browser I need to support with code at work), and I then have to go through deleting newlines.

Presumably there's some braindead code in Mefi that decides to swap newlines for break tags (personally, if I wanted break tags, I'd enter them...)
posted by andrew cooke at 3:56 AM on November 8, 2001


Oh my... No offense, but don't we really have bigger issues to worry about?

Yeah, like beating up on Calista Flockhart...

Oh, and don't forget Jennifer Lopez!

Not to mention the latest lame animation site: always a must see item.
posted by y2karl at 6:21 AM on November 8, 2001


Presumably there's some braindead code in Mefi that decides to swap newlines for break tags (personally, if I wanted break tags, I'd enter them...)

I wanted the database to be free of HTML formatting and I didn't want to expect people to have to put line breaks in by hand. "Braindead" is assuming everyone on earth that visits your site is well versed in HTML.

How else would you suggest I keep track of newlines without forcing people to input br's and p's into their comments?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:49 AM on November 8, 2001


Totally support Matt on this. I think it's pretty much the standard for sites like MeFi that allow users to insert text into a page. It does have problems, e.g., the BLOCKQUOTE behavior that I seem to be so obsessed with (search MeTa if you don't believe me).
posted by rodii at 8:58 AM on November 8, 2001


Other sites seem to assume that a blank line is a paragraph break. Isn't that enough? And you got that "braindead" for slinging around "moron", so don't get all prissy on me.
posted by andrew cooke at 10:03 AM on November 8, 2001


Good heavens, andrew, do you know who you're talking to? R-E-S-P-E-C-T, so to speak...

Besides, the line-breaking thing is a good idea. It lets formatting in the text box be intuitive, and makes it so that if we want to put in blank lines, we have to type two characters instead of eight. Hooray!
posted by j.edwards at 10:20 AM on November 8, 2001


you got that "braindead" for slinging around "moron"

Odd. I don't remember calling you a moron, I just said someone else's actions seemed moronic, if that is what they were doing.

You said other sites do blank lines as paragraph breaks and ignore other line breaks, but I can't remember a site having that kind of interaction. Would you care to offer a URL or two to sites that do things this way?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:26 AM on November 8, 2001


"and ignore other line breaks"

I don't think you could really do that. How would someone post something like:

1) First thingy
2) Next thingy
3) Final thingy

Without forcing them to know HTML of course.......
posted by y6y6y6 at 11:34 AM on November 8, 2001


Since user Paul Dunne was the one who originally reformatted his text, not Andrew Cooke, why did Andrew think Matt was calling him (Andrew) a moron? Just trying to clear that up.
posted by Karl at 1:29 PM on November 8, 2001


Jeez, andrew, lighten up.
posted by silusGROK at 2:44 PM on November 8, 2001


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