Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

@The Elvenqueen Damn, not sure what that could be, I'll have to take a look tomorrow.

@Odin Oh, thanks for letting me know.

I tried to make it so that you can log in with your new name OR any of your old names, but it sounds like the logic isn't quite there yet.

Might be related to Elvenqueen's problem.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Lady Amalthea Really? Nothing seems out of ordinary with the server or database metrics.

There were some weird output in the logs, but not anything conclusive.

I rebooted just in case.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Publius I bumped up the max tag count once I introduced more tags. Tag clutter just isn't a priority, yet.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@JBRam2002 roleplayerguild.com/posts/4317870 is pretty impressive.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Landaus Five-One Yeah, you can see and clear your drafts in the footer.



Sometimes they get out of sync, like if you open the same topic in two tabs while writing a post.

@JBRam2002 I would certainly be uncomfortable rushing to replace the current editor with a new one that's half-baked in other ways. That's not what I'm trying to do here.

One realistic strategy is to somehow let both editors exist on the Guild together. It could default to the new one since most posts hardly even use BBCode. Yet people could opt back in to the old editor. Seems pretty fair.

The only reason HTML comes up at all is because it's a necessary feature, not because I think HTML is the ideal markup language for a forum.

After all, the Guild's current editor works by rendering your BBCode into HTML for display in the browser. That's all BBCode is. And BBCode is something I could eventually implement for the new editor. The new editor is just 100x easier to work with.

HTML doesn't mean that people would be able to write whatever they want. That would be an amateur security vulnerability. HTML is similar to BBCode where the server simply ignores codes it doesn't whitelist.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Ellri It was super easy to avoid autolinking in code-blocks in my experimental editor. Jealous?



@NuttsnBolts The experimental editor has a code representation. Here it is for the post in the screenshot right above this line:

Hider

{
  "entityMap": {},
  "blocks": [
    {
      "key": "75t1p",
      "text": "Hello",
      "type": "unstyled",
      "depth": 0,
      "inlineStyleRanges": [],
      "entityRanges": [],
      "data": {}
    },
    {
      "key": "1p39a",
      "text": "Inside this code block,\nthis URL should not parse into a link: google.com",
      "type": "code-block",
      "depth": 0,
      "inlineStyleRanges": [],
      "entityRanges": [],
      "data": {}
    },
    {
      "key": "aa5qm",
      "text": "Goodbye google.com foo.com",
      "type": "unstyled",
      "depth": 0,
      "inlineStyleRanges": [],
      "entityRanges": [],
      "data": {}
    },
    {
      "key": "d2u73",
      "text": "Long URL: roleplayerguild.com/topics/75056-mahz…",
      "type": "unstyled",
      "depth": 0,
      "inlineStyleRanges": [],
      "entityRanges": [],
      "data": {}
    }
  ]
}

You can basically copy it from one editor and load it into another, and the editor will populate itself with the post for editing. Kinda like copying the /raw version of a post (roleplayerguild.com/posts/4324490/raw) and pasting it into the Guild's current editor.

So that's possible off the bat. Though of course it'd be nicer if that was transformed into something you could actually edit by hand (if you had to) like HTML. The editor can generate HTML, but it takes a little work to tell it how to read it back into its own representation.

Ultimately it'd be cool if it was transformed into BBCode and then you could copy the BBCode representation back into an editor. But that would require more work. It's certainly possible in the long term.

There isn't much difference between BBCode and HTML, really. They are both intermediate representations of media made for human editing that get rendered into something prettier.

You're right that HTML can lead to more security accidents, and that's of course because BBCode doesn't run in the browser, so it's hard to accidentally skip the step where you transform it into a neutered subset of HTML before rendering it. Though that's the same step you have to do with HTML that comes from the user.

I'm not sure if I'm demystifying anything in this essay , but I'm trying to clarify why a WYSIWYG editor is not a limitation.

My format coding isn't working?

^ Great example of why we need a new editor.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Altered Tundra I accidentally burned two hours window-shopping on fonts.google.com for cool fonts.

For instance, thought this was cool: fonts.google.com/specimen/Vollkorn

It'd be sweet to offer some 3rd party fonts but then give people the option to turn them off in the same way you can turn off signatures and avatars.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@BBeast Yeah, it seems relatively straightforward for me to transform WYSIWYG <-> HTML back and forth for when you want to fiddle with it.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I know it's controversial which is why it would just exist as an experiment on the side.

IMO almost anything is better than the Guild's current editor. Even something simple like choosing a color from the picker and then realizing you want a different color is infuriating. And there's no undo/redo stack.

Just tonight I've almost implemented more features in my experimental editor than the Guild's editor has.



And the features all work with undo/redo and text-highlighting. It's actually pleasant to use. You can even copy HTML into it.

Seems promising so far. But there's a lot more work involved before I can evaluate it thoroughly.