Solar wrote:Talking about how "a more WYSIWYG approach" would benefit forum editors, and mentioning NNTP as the better alternative in the same paragraph, should strike even you as a bit ridiculous. Yes, WYSIWYG in NNTP - because it's text-only...
What I said was:
- it was abstracted by the user interface (for example, automatically replacing word surrounded by asterisks by the correct BBCode, or a more WYSIWYGish approach)
IIRC, I was commenting BBcode, not comparing it to the Usenet "counterpart".
There is no quoting standard on NNTP. There is some consent to use nested ">", but even then everyone has their own idea whether to use ">" or "> ", and each NNTP client has its own way to add information as to who made that remark (starting at "XYZ wrote..." and going all the way to witty three-line headers). It's not the silver bullet, in the very least.
Yes, but it's the
de facto standard. The small differences aren't important, really. Apart from a few newsreaders that indeed use much different conventions by default, the differences are minor.
I think quoting is easier on Usenet because it facilitates splitting your quoted text into logical parts, to which you can answer separately.
What you describe here has a name in the minds of many people, namely "flamewar-style quoting".
Funny. But I don't agree with it.
Taking a statement apart word by word to prove you're right and the other one is wrong.
It's called "argumentation", and it's one of the core features of democracy.
(Or that you're wittier than him.) I'm guilty of using that style myself far too often - because I learned to walk the cyberspace on Usenet, that's why, and I'm not really proud of that part of it...
I don't like top-posting. People often forget parts of the original message and it's not much useful, because I've already read the original message, thanks.
Even being valid that you're not always argumenting when you are in a message board [alike] place, inline-replies is still helpful in the cases when you aren't [argumenting].
And you don't need to use inline-replies. The Usenet convention for quoting only facilitates that reply style, it doesn't impose it.
Now, I here you asking: "how many times have you needed to enter a tab in a forum?". My answer is: few. But when I do, this fact doesn't make it less irritating (in fact, I tend to use many tabs while writing source code in this forum).
And Google Groups is better?
Google groups is not exactly what I would call a normal newsreader (it's not even a newsreader), so this short sentence is completely void.
I'd find it rather irritating to use an NNTP client that would not send the focus to the next widget on tab-press. It's how GUIs work, isn't it?
You would? Would you then find it irritating to use a text editor that would not send the focus to the next widget on tab-press?
No? In that case, I don't understand why... After all,
It's how GUIs work, isn't it?
Also, about the quotes once more, one proof about BBCode being a bad idea for quoting is this screenshot of the edit window I'm writing on...
Try line breaks.
Already tried. In fact, it was my default, not a "trial".
They're free, you know?
Erm... didn't know, really. In my computer/browser the price is a really bad appearance in the final result, with unbalanced spaces between blocks of text.
But perhaps your browser renders it differently, I don't know...
Personally, I wouldn't ask the maintainers to spend more of their spare time to satisfy the few. If I would, I'd probably be friendlier about it, or perhaps offer to do it for them...
I'll not ask the maintainers to spend time with the tab problem because it's a minor problem, and because it would imply not using a web interface. As this is a forum, by definition it uses a crappy web interface. If it stopped using a web interface, it wouldn't be a forum anymore.
But this is not my point at all, indeed.
JJ
