We see malformed posts here on a daily basis, very often from newcomers who haven't yet learned about <code> tags. The editors spend a fair amount of time cleaning up malformed posts, but still the posts come.
I wonder if there isn't a simple way to avoid many malformed posts. All we would need to do would be to apply some proactive education in the right place.
What if, below each <TEXTAREA> for entering and updating nodes, there appeared a brief summary of tag and entity conventions. It could appear based on a user setting that could be turned off once someone knew there way around (and was past the point of not knowing about posting conventions).
The summary might read:
Please read _______ before making your first post.
Use <p> to separate paragraphs, or <br> to force a line break.
Use <code> .. </code> tags around code fragments. These work like
<pre> tags, which you should not use.
Use <b>bold</b> for bold text, and <i>italic</i> for italic.
To link to a node, use [id://node_id] or [id://node_id|optional words]
To link externally, use [http://www.example.com/|optional words]
Links are disabled within <code> tags.
Outside of <code> tags, use [ and ] for [ and ].
See _________ for additonal details. To disable this summary, uncheck _____ in your user settings.
Does this seem reasonable? If so, what kinds of things would you like to see in a such a summary?
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Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
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Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
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Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
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Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
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