[FFML] A thought on the future of the FFML

[Brian Randall]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Arthur Hansen <arthurh3535 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Wanderer has a point here.  For the most part, if
>> we're to make this transition, it needs to be the
>> *exact same* content between mailing list and
>> forum, and that include markup (or lack thereof).
>>
>> A usable balance might well be to adopt the
>> simple markup standard:
>> *This is shown as bold in the Web forum.*
>> /This is shown as italic in the Web forum./
>> _This is shown as underlined in the Web forum._
>
> I would rather not force new people to have to use an archaic
> formatting technique just because some people are dead set on 'plain
> text only, dammit'.

Because '/' is so much more complex than '<i>'+</i>'?  -_-

Personally, I write in markdown, which is incredibly similar -- the
point being it's human readable as well as marking up into proper
HTML.  My website then also uses html2text for us old fogies that do,
in fact, prefer text (or want a plaintext copy to make something for
their e-readers, or whatever -- that certainly seems to be a thing).

For example:

html -- http://soulriders.net/brian/fanfic/baroque/

text -- http://soulriders.net/brian/fanfic/baroque/baroque.txt

In any case, if you can learn a more complex markup (html), learning a
simpler one is trivial.  You'd only be limited to plain text because
you refused to learn a simpler markup than html.

...

There may be a compromise, though.  It would be fairly trivial to make
a widget somewhere you could dump your html into and get that code out
... it's just sed.  Probably even on a web interface.  All other
unsupported tags could be stripped out, and then there you go -- you
get to write in html, and it still outputs into something everyone can
read.

> Sheesh, are you people going to yell at people to get off your lawn, too?

At least three times a day, yes.

--
Brian Randall
--
Yrne awaits those with the courage to seek it.
--
I write fanfiction. Too much of it. You can read it here, on my
terrible webpage:
http://www.soulriders.net/brian/