Subject:
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Re: // and ** vs {} and [] (was: testing in rtl...)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.publish, lugnet.admin.nntp
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Date:
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Sat, 31 May 2003 18:27:51 GMT
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Viewed:
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516 times
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In lugnet.publish, Brian H. Nielsen wrote:
> I'm not sure what your above comment has to do with FTX supporting non-word
> aligned positions for the formatting characters, no matter which character set
> is used. I was attempting to point out that // and ** would seem to be more
> troublesome since they are more common than {} and [] in normal text.
Oh I agree that // and ** are potentially more troublesome than {} and [] in
normal text -- and that's why {} and [] were chosen instead. But I think the
"troublesome" part may be entirely solveable from a coding standpoint.
> My other point was to ask for clarification of whether or not you were going
> to remove support for non-word aligned formatting characters. I got the
> impression from your prior examples that you were considering only formatting
> characters that were word-aligned, unlike current FTX support for non-word
> aligned formatting characters.
It depends. If the advantages of simplicity of // and ** outweigh the
disadvantages of {} and [] (which are mainly that you might actually want to use
one of those characters in text once in a while) then it may actually be an
acceptable trade-off to drop {} and [] and lose non-word-aligned formatting of
italics and boldface. I'm not saying it would be for sure, but it might be. It
all depends on how troublesome {} and [] prove to be in the threaded messaging
context.
> Well, I was trying to put that in the context of it being more onerous if the
> formatting characters // and ** are supported. They would seem to be more
> likely to need cleaning up, and less obvious. Posters who do not take the time
> to study and learn the in's and out's of FTX might get frustrated faster and
> possibly be more reluctant to reply to FTX formatted messages.
I wouldn't add support for // and ** unless a proven parsing algorithm were
found that passed a huge suite of test cases with flying colors. :-)
> I havn't tried replying in plain-text to an FTX formatted message, so I don't
> know what kind of cleaning up would have to be done in that case. If you're
> asserting that no clean up would be needed, that is good.
Ya without any editing it just looks like regular text with a few special
characters thrown in in the case of italics and boldface. Tables look kind of
weird. Bulleted lists and section headings look great. Underlining looks
great. Hyperinks look great.
--Todd
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