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When to use Friendica over Mastodon
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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2023
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@serenity@jeremmy.ml wrote:
Have you tried BBCodes? while in your node press on your profile name in the top-right corner of your screen (if you're using the Frio theme) > Help > BBCode tag reference to see what you can do. They can do everything you said.
Thanks for the info about BBCode. I didn’t know about this option before. However I can’t figure out how to implement some of it. I was testing out alt text and am pretty sure I was formatting the BBCode properly. Once I created the post, it would display the image but I could never figure out how to view the alt text. Do you know how to implement it?
@petrescatraian @Samlane86 Did you have a go at the spoiler tag?
[spoiler=Reveal Text]spoiled text[/spoiler]@Samlane86 Guess it shows up when the image does not load properly. Or when you hover your cursor over the image. Usually if you type should work just fine. That's what I do at least.
Edit: here's an example:
Also use the preview pane/button before posting a comment, so you can make adjustments if something goes wrong. In my experience, lists do not work properly unless you use
*to make lists, as Friendica does support markdown as well. However, it turns markdown into bbcode, so if I have to edit a comment with a list, I have to switch back to Markdown formatting there.Correction: I just tried again and viewed the post on Mastodon. The alt text does appear there, so the code does work. Just not when viewed on Friendica. Am I just looking in the wrong places? Or does it just not display natively?
Of all the markup languages in the world, why BBCode??
@sxan @petrescatraian It seemed like a good idea in 2010 for a PHP app with a forum-like feature.
Yeah, I get the origins. I wish there'd be a mime-type update to move it into modern times.
The irony is that they got it right in the 80's. Simple markup conventions forced by pre-mime text/plain emails and, later in the 90's, SMS are still the basis for most lightweight markup languages.
@petrescatraian @sxan What's wrong with BBCode? It is simpler to learn for non-technical folks.
Is it? Really? Easier for non-technical users than Markdown?
Most simple markup languages (djot, markdown, asciidoc, textile, etc.) are based on 7-bit ASCII markup that people have been using in email and SMS for decades. They're compact and straightforward. BBCode is a bastardization (I use that in its technical sense more than as a pejorative) of HTML; it's verbose and unintuitive.
Give a non-technical person with no other information a keyboard and a plain text field and ask them to emphasize a word in some text. I'll bet the first thing they do is all caps. If you ask them to do it without caps, I bet you'll get something like surrounding the text in asterisks or hashmarks, but regardless, what you won't get is bracket-B-bracket followed by a closing tag.
BBCode is just straight-up HTML for people allergic to pointy characters. That's hardly non-technical.
@sxan I have different opinion on this but I am not UX specialist.
Surely to just highlight something it is easier to use underscore or similar characters but when you want to have variety of formatting styles in my opinon text tags are easier to remember and use. Yes, more to type but BBCode-enabled solutions usually provide some sort of assist.
Also Markdown tends to conflict with user input more often which is confusing.