HTML in messages should be disabled all the time and the checkbox should be removed. As BB is just supported, the whole HTML support is superfluous as well. At least I don´t see any extra benefits of supporting HTML in messages.
Ernest Friedman-Hill
,
author and iconoclast
staff
Bauke Scholtz wrote:
At least I don´t see any extra benefits of supporting HTML in messages.
Reasons to have HTML
Number
Explanation
1
How about tables?
Rest assured that there are plenty of other reasons why HTML is useful. In the future, we may turn it off for some forums (our old UBB saloon allowed HTML in some, but not all, forums) and we will continue to fine tune the support.
As geeks, we generally have a lot of the HTML stuff memorized. While creating substitutes with BB codes will work, it does require memorizing more stuff.
HTML will be around in these forums for quite a while yet. It makes me happy. The trick is to find a path so that others can be happy too.
We should not assume that the newcomers already know that HTML is by default enabled and we should never assume that they already are familiar with code blocks. I would just disable HTML by default so that one who actually want to use HTML (and thus is fully aware about the possibilities of the forum) just can enable it. I've read countless messages and posted many replies, but I haven't seen or posted any reply where HTML is used effectively. But I have seen more than enough messages which got garbled because one "accidently" posted HTML in it.
Talking about that, it look like that the forum's registration form doesn't handle the charset correctly. I've seen users been registered where for example the î is been replaced by the well known square with the question mark in it. Though some usernames got fixed automagically behind the scenes. But OK, that's another story.