friends, I have a poll question for you, which is connected with the rewriting of valka.cz to the new host I am working on. One of the tasks that I have set myself is to get rid of all the "unnecessary" and unused ballast that has accumulated here over time, always under good pretences, and which does not serve its purpose, or rather does not serve to the extent that it "burdens".
By burden you can imagine either my time, which I have to devote to the maintenance or development of a given function, its migration to new versions, maintaining and fixing bugs, etc., but also your time, which you have to spend waiting for something to load.
One of these features that I am "addicted" to is the contribution editor, that is, to be clear, this
Why? Because the scripts that this editor requires to run are HUGE, about 500kB, which is about 1/6 of all the data uploaded on our site, excluding ads. Therefore, it is probably a good idea to think about how much we actually use it, and what features we "need" from it, or where we would like to go next in terms of inserting contributions.
In the picture above you can see the main things the editor can do:
1) writing plain text
2) buttons for quick insertion of some predefined tag/marker, but without any more complex functions.
3) highlighting tags / tags in the post in color
4) date highlighting in the post in color
5) for the linker, more of a technical thing, to mark a part of the text and allow to click to "wrap" it with tags / tags. (I mention this here for completeness, the linker will always be preserved, only this was historically a terrible hassle and it worked differently in different browsers, so the editor helped me a lot at the time, but time has advanced considerably and it can be solved with effort).
Therefore, my first question is: which functions from the above are important for you, which ones do you use, and which ones are you not aware of?
Second question: do you use the buttons above the editor to insert tags?
And now a little more talk before I ask the third question.
Historically, this forum and site started on a platform called phpBBforum, where there were categories, topics, users who could post and format posts using a set of tags. These are the things in square brackets that you know so well. The idea at the time, say 18 years ago, was that it wasn't easy to do straight HTML, so a subset of tags were selected, put into [] instead of <> (which HTML uses), and then each time each post is displayed, the transformation is made from the "bb tag" to "html", which the browser can display.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this.
The advantages include the fact that it is just a tag, which the background programmer can freely transform into any set of one or more HTML tags, add formatting, and change the entire design without having to go back and redo all the posts where the tags are used. At the same time, it is a simplified version of HTML, because it offers significantly more parameters in each tag than you have available here (or for many of them there is no parameter, just do [ b ] and you're done. But a link [ url= ] is already a parameter of the URL you want to link to. We can also create other, new, custom tags that don't exist in HTML (the various table headings, centered images and many, many more), but which are transformed into HTML in the background in some way.
And now the disadvantages. The disadvantage visible from the above text is the transformation. Each contribution must be taken, loaded from the database, and the transformation performed on it. You can think of it as a set of SEARCH AND REPLACE, find and replace commands that you know from Word. If you find a BB TAG of something, replace it with the HTML tag of something else. Only then can you send it to the browser, which will display it to the user. There are ways to get around this, so that the processed contribution is stored in memory for a while, and if someone else wants it, it is resent directly, without transformation, but this is a workaround to the above problem. The second problem is that there is actually no nice "small" editor, in terms of data, that can not only insert BB codes / tags, but also display them. We call it a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get), where you don't use tags for formatting, but just write and choose formats from a menu, just like when you write in Word. Of course there are the tags in the background, but you don't have to care about that, you just write, make a title, bold, whatever, and you can see how it will look in the post. You don't look at the jumble of tags and text, you just look at the resulting text. No modern editor with BB TAGS can do that, and if it does, it's only partially. Tables and similar ficuras we have here will never work without a huge amount of work. On the other hand, there is a wide variety of HTML WYSIWYG editors and it is quite easy to extend and enrich them. For example, our article editor works as a WYSIWIG editor, because it is already in HTML and there are no special BB tags, the output is straight HTML and the article does not undergo such massive "preprocessing" before it is displayed.
So the third question is: can you imagine that instead of writing half text, half tags and code, we switch to a single editor like our article editor and start writing directly in HTML? for the less technically proficient I believe that it will mean NOTHING, you will just forget the BB tags we used to use here and start using the menu options in the new editor instead. Nothing more. For more technically savvy people there will be a "switch to source code" function where you can edit a lot of things (Janko probably knows what I'm talking about, from his experience with the article editor). We're not talking about enabling some big and complex formatting, letter sizes and similar crap, we do NOT need that here. There will be 2-3 levels of headings, bold, italic, underlining, tables, youtube videos, twitter, images and our special tags for example for table headings, tables with overviews, shrunken images and all other tags you know, but they won't be in square brackets, but in curly brackets ... Anyway, apart from the template-tables, the vast majority of our contributions do not contain ANY formatting, it's mostly just plain text
Is it somehow tragic for you that we would switch like this and throw away the whole BB code with its transformations in the future and switch to pure HTML, without any intermediate steps?
By burden you can imagine either my time, which I have to devote to the maintenance or development of a given function, its migration to new versions, maintaining and fixing bugs, etc., but also your time, which you have to spend waiting for something to load.
One of these features that I am "addicted" to is the contribution editor, that is, to be clear, this
Why? Because the scripts that this editor requires to run are HUGE, about 500kB, which is about 1/6 of all the data uploaded on our site, excluding ads. Therefore, it is probably a good idea to think about how much we actually use it, and what features we "need" from it, or where we would like to go next in terms of inserting contributions.
In the picture above you can see the main things the editor can do:
1) writing plain text
2) buttons for quick insertion of some predefined tag/marker, but without any more complex functions.
3) highlighting tags / tags in the post in color
4) date highlighting in the post in color
5) for the linker, more of a technical thing, to mark a part of the text and allow to click to "wrap" it with tags / tags. (I mention this here for completeness, the linker will always be preserved, only this was historically a terrible hassle and it worked differently in different browsers, so the editor helped me a lot at the time, but time has advanced considerably and it can be solved with effort).
Therefore, my first question is: which functions from the above are important for you, which ones do you use, and which ones are you not aware of?
Second question: do you use the buttons above the editor to insert tags?
And now a little more talk before I ask the third question.
Historically, this forum and site started on a platform called phpBBforum, where there were categories, topics, users who could post and format posts using a set of tags. These are the things in square brackets that you know so well. The idea at the time, say 18 years ago, was that it wasn't easy to do straight HTML, so a subset of tags were selected, put into [] instead of <> (which HTML uses), and then each time each post is displayed, the transformation is made from the "bb tag" to "html", which the browser can display.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this.
The advantages include the fact that it is just a tag, which the background programmer can freely transform into any set of one or more HTML tags, add formatting, and change the entire design without having to go back and redo all the posts where the tags are used. At the same time, it is a simplified version of HTML, because it offers significantly more parameters in each tag than you have available here (or for many of them there is no parameter, just do [ b ] and you're done. But a link [ url= ] is already a parameter of the URL you want to link to. We can also create other, new, custom tags that don't exist in HTML (the various table headings, centered images and many, many more), but which are transformed into HTML in the background in some way.
And now the disadvantages. The disadvantage visible from the above text is the transformation. Each contribution must be taken, loaded from the database, and the transformation performed on it. You can think of it as a set of SEARCH AND REPLACE, find and replace commands that you know from Word. If you find a BB TAG of something, replace it with the HTML tag of something else. Only then can you send it to the browser, which will display it to the user. There are ways to get around this, so that the processed contribution is stored in memory for a while, and if someone else wants it, it is resent directly, without transformation, but this is a workaround to the above problem. The second problem is that there is actually no nice "small" editor, in terms of data, that can not only insert BB codes / tags, but also display them. We call it a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get), where you don't use tags for formatting, but just write and choose formats from a menu, just like when you write in Word. Of course there are the tags in the background, but you don't have to care about that, you just write, make a title, bold, whatever, and you can see how it will look in the post. You don't look at the jumble of tags and text, you just look at the resulting text. No modern editor with BB TAGS can do that, and if it does, it's only partially. Tables and similar ficuras we have here will never work without a huge amount of work. On the other hand, there is a wide variety of HTML WYSIWYG editors and it is quite easy to extend and enrich them. For example, our article editor works as a WYSIWIG editor, because it is already in HTML and there are no special BB tags, the output is straight HTML and the article does not undergo such massive "preprocessing" before it is displayed.
So the third question is: can you imagine that instead of writing half text, half tags and code, we switch to a single editor like our article editor and start writing directly in HTML? for the less technically proficient I believe that it will mean NOTHING, you will just forget the BB tags we used to use here and start using the menu options in the new editor instead. Nothing more. For more technically savvy people there will be a "switch to source code" function where you can edit a lot of things (Janko probably knows what I'm talking about, from his experience with the article editor). We're not talking about enabling some big and complex formatting, letter sizes and similar crap, we do NOT need that here. There will be 2-3 levels of headings, bold, italic, underlining, tables, youtube videos, twitter, images and our special tags for example for table headings, tables with overviews, shrunken images and all other tags you know, but they won't be in square brackets, but in curly brackets ... Anyway, apart from the template-tables, the vast majority of our contributions do not contain ANY formatting, it's mostly just plain text
Is it somehow tragic for you that we would switch like this and throw away the whole BB code with its transformations in the future and switch to pure HTML, without any intermediate steps?
