I've given this a lot of thought the last week orso, and here are my observations on the subject.
First of all, I would like to thank *anyone* for investing their free time in the FreeBSD project, no matter how small or trivial, many small changes add up to large (and often important) ones.
That being said, this of course doesn't mean that a contribution is free from criticism. And at the risk of being perceived a curmudgeon, here's mine.
According to
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=8816 the reasons for tags are:
Using them may greatly enhance the readability of your posts. Using them will also make the moderators' and fellow readers' lives easier. Not using them will make your posts look cluttered, clumsy and uninteresting.
[...]
Without using formatting, people tend to stumble over words they do not immediately recognize as 'non-words', forcing them to read back.
[...]
Compare the readability:
"I used sysinstall and looked at dmesg afterwards. I noticed that cron showed up in ps, but not in top."
"I used sysinstall and looked at dmesg afterwards. I noticed that cron showed up in ps, but not in top."
There is certainly truth in this, but almost any concept implemented wrongly or pushed to extremes or quickly breaks down, in this case, both happen.
Emphasis inflates quickly (in whatever form, bold, colours, underlined, etc), the more it's used, the less actual `emphasis' is conveyed upon a single emphasized word/sentence, the eyeball gets attracted to one or two {bold,green,blue,..} word(s) quickly, but not so much to 10 {bold,green,blue,..} words.
Thus adding emphasis to things that don't deserve emphasis as such only serves to distract from things that *really* do need emphasis.
The quoted sentence above is an excellent example of this.
Note that there is a
difference between emphasis and typographical distinction (such as a different font, mono font, italics, etc.), typographical distinction is very useful and should pretty much always be used when possible, the problem is that all tags also add emphasis, and don't just use a typographical distinction (I am at least partly to blame in this, since I created the first set of tags
). This is getting worse quickly with the addition of the user tag (there is almost never a reason that a username is truly important to the content of the post, and it's emphasized a whopping four times: mono, color, bold, italics).
Here's an example of adding typographical distinction instead of emphasis (as image, since it's difficult to do with the current bbcode):
This does add clear distinction between normal text and system commands while *not* drawing immediate attention to the commands (because, as such, they're not deserving of the special attention).
Note this is also how most technical books and manpages work. Even though it's possible for them to have colors, they usually choose not to. [1]
Why this typography primer? Well, for these reasons (& also aesthetic reasons, I must admit) I *choose* not to add a tag to *every* file/command/variable/whatever else is `supposed' to get one.
I don't have a choice in the matter though, since my posts get edited anyway[1]. Just to be clear, I sometimes spend a significant amount of time on my posts, 15 minutes or (significantly) more is not unusual, I try to be as correct as I can, test commands, re-read my post for spelling/grammar errors, etc. (This doesn't mean I don't goof up or that I am correct, I just want to make it clear I don't just type down the first thing that comes to mind without paying attention to detail).
So, the situation is:
- I spend quite time on making a post.
- A mod edits this
- My reasons for *not* using the style guidelines are pretty solid (IMHO ofcourse, but it's *my* post), so I change it back.
- It gets changed back.
- I get frustrated.
- I'm pretty sure the mod gets frustrated.
So, what can we do?
Well, first of all, I'm not sure if anyone else perceives this as I problem, I certainly do to the point I frequent these forums less often or none at all, unless there are people who really dislikes me, I'm fairly certain no one wants this (I certainly don't).
Proposed solutions might be any combination of:
1) Better tags, as outlined above.
2) Less editing of posts (there are certainly cases this *is* okay).
3) Make it visible what has been edited.
In general, I don't have a particular preference, although I find bbcode awkward to use.
markdown seems available for vBulletin and would be awesome.
Thank you for reading and sorry for the long post, if my writing skills would be better, I would make it shorter :-(
[1]: Some may argue that it's technically difficult or expensive to have colors in a book, this was the case 20 years ago, but these days the cost difference is small. In addition, you can also create a wide range of grayscale colors, many books do in images, but never in text (I checked my programming books). One book does have color (ppk on Javascript), but only sparingly (images or warning labels, where it is appropriate).
[2]: To make matters worse, there's no diff or even a note, thus there is
no accountability! I'm pretty sure there have been a number of mistakes of various in the editing of my posts (I would also make them if I would have to edit a zillion posts), but I can never be sure if the mistake was mine or someone else's.
