Spoiler Tag? May 9, 2021 9:33 AM   Subscribe

Could we get a <spoiler> tag?

Hitting Google Site Search, seems the original discussions on this were back in 2006/2009, and evidently the <details> tag does not work universally. Wondering if it's doable nowadays; lots of circumstances where it'd be useful.
posted by metabaroque to Feature Requests at 9:33 AM (11 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- loup



Support for the <details> tag has grown. It works in all current browsers except Opera Mini. I believe the only other browser with significant market share that does not support it is IE 11 (released in 2013, but still used by about 1% of internet users).
posted by mbrubeck at 9:41 AM on May 9, 2021 [2 favorites]


(Also, there was a Firefox bug that broke the rendering of the <summary> tag on MetaFilter, but this was fixed a while ago.)
posted by mbrubeck at 9:43 AM on May 9, 2021


Sorry, one last comment: Aside from browser support, the <details> tag can be inconvenient with screen readers, and this could be an issue with custom spoiler tags as well, depending on their implementation.
posted by mbrubeck at 9:56 AM on May 9, 2021 [3 favorites]


See What secrets lie within from 2018 for more recent discussion of using the details tag.
posted by Celsius1414 at 9:57 AM on May 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


Perhaps the better question is what prompted the request for spoiler over details; presumably metabaroque has been burned by the latter.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:30 AM on May 9, 2021 [2 favorites]


This would presumably be a bunch of work to implement; < details > is an actual HTML5 tag, and < spoiler > would have to be implemented for all the subsites, themes, and devices that use Metafilter.

I'd say it's probably better to try to get people to use browsers which support the details tag than it is to reimplement it on the Metafilter side.
posted by sagc at 10:37 AM on May 9, 2021 [3 favorites]


Seems like this part of the FAQ should be updated, at a minimum, to clarify support and also explicitly respond to questions about “spoiler tags”.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:06 AM on May 10, 2021


Would it be fairly straightforward to add functionality for the details tag to the comment box, the same way that there's options for Bold, Italic, and Links? That wouldn't fix any problems with screen readers, but honestly since it's a standard HTML5 tag it seems more like a problem for screen readers to solve than for Metafilter to solve.

I've never heard anything about admins not liking the use of Details on the site, metabaroque. Are you saying you've had the tag removed here on Metafilter? Even if no one is willing to add official support for Details to the comment box, this thread would be a useful place for Cortex or a mod to say what the current policy is on its use.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:33 PM on May 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


I've gotten the impression from that that the details tag was not welcome on the MeFi sites.

This definitely is not the case, we specifically suggest the use of the details tag in the FAQ. I'm not sure what you're referring to and would be happy to offer more advice if it's helpful. I feel like the FAQ entry for spoilers is fairly clear, is it not?

I think the comment box could definitely use some updates, I don't know where that is on the roadmap. It's hard on mobile as it is. That said the site isn't really a place where there's a lot of spoileriffic discussion most of the time and having a fanfare-specific comment box seems like it might be a bridge too far with our creaky codebase.

For now official policy is: use the details tag.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:08 PM on May 10, 2021


Speaking of the comment box toolbar, I would love to have a button for the <blockquote> tag. Out of the handful of tags I use in MeFi comments, it's by far the longest and most annoying to type, especially on mobile. (But I also understand the desire to keep the toolbar fairly small.)
posted by mbrubeck at 4:12 PM on May 10, 2021


It's possible there was some sort of not-the-right-place-for-it use of it or I don't know what. You can hit us up on the contact form if you have questions about that.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:02 PM on May 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


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