Twitter Style User Addressing

[zorkian]

Title:
Twitter Style User Addressing

Area:
html formatting

Summary:
It would be convenient and fairly typical of the modern Internet to be able to refer to accounts using a nice shorthand. I propose using the Twitter style: @mark would be the equivalent of <user name="mark">.

Description:
Writing HTML isn't something that comes naturally to many people. Twitter's style of addressing has been used for many years in email (they certainly didn't make it up) and is now gaining broad acceptance as a modern way of referring to other user accounts.

Given that, I think that it would be awesome to type @denise and have it show up as if I had typed <user name="denise">.

Furthermore, I think that it would be great to be able to easily refer to other people on other domains. For example, I think @news.lj would be easier to type than <user name="news" site="livejournal.com">. Even if we had to type @news.livejournal.com that's a lot easier to type than remembering the HTML and exactly what to put in it.

Poll #2493 Twitter Style User Addressing

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 163

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
66 (40.5%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
22 (13.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
57 (35.0%)

(I have no opinion)
14 (8.6%)

(Other: please comment)
4 (2.5%)

Comments

[feathertail]

Stylistically, it seems very un-Dreamwidth. But I suspect that if it's adopted we'll see a lot more cross-linking.

[mark]

I'm curious about how you see it as un-Dreamwidth-y?

I'm all for making things that are easier to use. If they happen to come from some other site, then I'm generally okay with that as long as it's not something that is going to harm the culture or anything.

[jumpuphigh]

I love this idea. When I first started using LJ, I didn't know any html and I had to have the help cheat sheet open all the time. While I am glad that I learned it, I think it would make DW appeal to a broader range of people who would really contribute in valuable ways to the community. Additionally, I think it would make the site more accessible and accessibility is important. Requiring someone to learn html formatting can be an impediment to people who have trouble learning new things. (I'm specifically thinking about problems like multiple sclerosis and brain injuries but everybody's brain is different and learning computer language can be impossible for some people.)

[chagrined]

I like this (less typing yay), but would additionally that if implemented, care should be taken so that actual email addresses (whoever@wherever.whatever) are still formatted as email addresses, and not accidentally as usernames or whatnot.

[erinptah]

Ahh, you beat me to it XD

[erinptah]

My only worry would be that I don't want strange autoformatting kicking in when I'm trying to type an email address.

[damned_colonial]

... or Perl code.

[sophie]

YES YES YES. I really love this idea.

With one change, though - please make it a journal-wide setting that can be turned on or off for individual posts. This is especially true for, say, LoudTwitter posts; for these posts, @xxx refers to the user on Twitter, not DW.

And, obviously, it'd need to know know to link the domain parts of email addresses...

[damned_colonial]

Agreed re: turn-offable setting. At the very least we need a way to escape particular instances, so that eg. if I'm showing someone how to do Perl code, and type:

my @array = qw(foo bar baz)

it doesn't turn it into array.

[white_aster]

As much as I predict Twitter will eventually go the way of so many other social networking Things, I have to admit that shortening the userlink and crosslinking tags would be awesome. I've had to give up and save it as a clipboard snippet, so that I'll remember the code for these things.

I don't know how much I like the idea of the @tag being 'naked', though. I'm sure that there are folks who use @ symbols, and we don't want them to get mixed up in the syntax (like, for instance, if someone posts an email addy). I dunno, would something like <@denise> and <@news.livejournal.com> work? Still much shorter, and not likely to be triggered by accident?

[sophie]

Email addresses can be easily checked for. So while:

"I sent an email to example@example.com today..."

...wouldn't be linked, I'm envisioning that:

"I sent an email to @username today..."

...would be displayed as:

"I sent an email to username today..."

[damned_colonial]

I'm interested in this claim that @ addressing was used in email before Twitter. I've never heard of that before. Anyone got a cite for it? Was it some sub-section of the population doing so?

[mark]

I'm 99% sure I've seen it in email a long, long time before Twitter came on the scene. I don't have any cites, though, so it's very possibly wrong.

[melannen]

I support this idea, but I'm not sure I like using the twitter markup - it's pretty distinctively twittery, and there are other methods used (like DeviantArt's, which I find overcomplicated, but is certainly flexible, and would be less likely to be triggered accidentally, or a wiki-style markup using square brackets or something.)

But you would have to make it easy to turn off (both for an entire post, and with some kind of escape character for people who know that sort of thing), and keep supporting the old styles.

[stellar_dust]

.. also it should be turn-offable globally, not just on a post-by-post basis.

[rho]

As others have said, there needs to be a way to turn this off. There are too many reasons for someone to be typing @something without it being a username not to (in addition to what's already been said, consider "please send to my @example.com email address" or "3 chocolate bars @30p"). It can be messy and annoying on Twitter, which tends towards messiness anyway because of the character limit, but in a more polished macroblogging context like Dreamwidth, I think that it would stand out like a sore thumb.

So long as there is a way to turn it off (and I don't really care which way) then I think this is a great idea.

[sorchasilver]

+1

[stellar_dust]

In theory I like the idea of shortening the username form especially the way you describe cross-site functionality. But I also don't want to lose the ability to type @ - in email addresses, or perl code, or "I was @ school today" or "comments @ LJ please," or using "--~@~--" to divide up an entry. It's already bothersome enough that I had to memorize the html entity codes for < and > if I ever want to use them in a post. I like the idea of having some sort of escape character, something like &@stellar_dust.dw if you don't want to enclose it in brackets, but at the same time I realize that won't be as intuitive for people coming from Twitter/FB.

I don't have a good answer, but -- I like the keys I hit on the keyboard to correspond to what I see on the screen, and I have an immediate reaction against making any more changes to that 1:1 relationship.

also I don't like smart quotes or using [/] in forum posts

[kyrielle]

For an escape code, maybe @@? Doubling it up means 'no I really meant that' might be a little more intuitive?

[lightgetsin]

Agreed, particularly making it simpler and easier to refer to people at other sites. I've been htmling for years, and I screw those up on a regular basis. Just taking out the html syntax would be good, but also using the obvious abbreviations --lj, ij, dj,jf, ao3, etc. would be excellent.

[afuna]

Hmm, how would we refer to openid accounts, versus external accounts? It's the difference between news.livejournal.com (<user name="news.livejournal.com">) and news (<user name="news" site="livejournal.com>) -- not an argument against, just something I want to clarify!

The other thing, is the @-part going to be displayed / made obvious somehow, or do we document the new syntax, but not display the @? I think it would look better with the @ not displayed, but also part of the reason that the @ is so intuitive on Twitter is that it's displayed as part of the name, making it ubiquitous, and easy for new users to see how that effect was achieved.

[mark]

We wouldn't display the at-sign. But, hey, we don't display the HTML anyway... people would just have to learn it over time.

As to how to do other things: well, that's pretty easy. @URL is going to be an OpenID account (if it exists). @user.site is going to be a user at another site. @news.livejournal.com (local OpenID account) vs @news.lj (remote user).

[aedifica]

I'm one more in favor as long as it can be turned off at will.

[zvi]

I don't see how we can resolve @exampleusername to exampleusername and display the @ symbol, and, without displaying the @ symbol, I think afuna's right, that this opacity will cause the adoption to be limited. (I'd be really curious to know what the percentage use of lj user= vs. user name= is. I know there are people who still use LJ style markup. Hell, I still use lj-raw, because I can't ever remember if it's raw-code or code-raw.)

Also, I remember that the idea of @ came up wrt notifying people they'd been referenced, a sort of generalized pingback. I'm honestly not sure I see the utility of creating a third way to reference user accounts that people will have to learn works differently from both facebook and twitter, which is where they picked up the @example behavior from.

Further, I actually think the abbreviations are a bad idea. It means that (a) any tla is going to need to be picked up by the site right away, because everyone will expect that DW refers elegantly to any really popular site (like, oh, twitter or facebook, when you use the @ symbol) and (b) the site is going to have to standardize on a tla. Of the sites I commonly see referred to acronymically, I know that DW is unstable and that ao3/a30 are unstable. And I suspect that someone, somewhere knows the most common abbreviation for twitter, but heck if I know what it is.

[mark]

The advantage of running the site is that we can declare 'X is the abbreviation we use'. Communities sometimes will adopt something on their own and come to a conclusion on how to reference things but it doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes the people implementing it have to make the call and the users will get used to it (or not use it).

We wouldn't need to use '.dw' since we're the local site. I would say we use '.ao3' since that's the one that I've seen the most, but I'd rather deputize that decision to someone like you or denise anyway since that's not my area of expertise. But if nobody can come to a decision, then I'd decide as above.

I don't know if we want to create shortcuts for every potential site, either. I can see arguments for the shorthands only working to refer to things like Dreamwidth, LJ, and AO3 users. Making a passing reference to a Twitter or Facebook account doesn't have to be supported if we don't feel it's the right thing to do.

[jerico_cacaw]

The other comments are quite interesting.

Re: DW vs LJ HTML, one of the reasons I post on DW and cross-post to LJ is that I always forget the HTML LJ structure. It's not unusual for me to preview an LJ entry three or four times to fix my cuts, userIDs, etc -- I always get them wrong, because the 'rules' are not the same for different tags. DW, on the other hand, is much more intuitive. My memory is an awful thing, and when I stop using something for a week or more, I have to relearn it again. Some things stick; for example, strong, small, and user name are easier for me to remember than b, li, q -- because they are self explicative. Which is more obvious in DW than in LJ.

That being said, I would like to see a shortcut for DW IDs but I'm not sure @ should be used. It might be because, in Spanish, @ has been used the last few years as a way to encompass the male and female genders in one single word without repeating it (because it looks like a mix of 'o' and 'a') -- for example, 'niñ@s' instead of 'niñas y niños' (girls and boys), or 'Mexican@s' instead of 'Mexicanas y Mexicanos' (Mexican women and Mexican men). Gender differentiation in words is more frequent in Spanish than in English, so I understand this particular use of the symbol is not one that will be seen much in most journals. Still, I wanted to share this.

Maybe a combination of symbols and words, like other have suggested? But a more intuitive one, like jerico_cacaw and [Unknown site tag]jerico_cacaw.

[jerico_cacaw]

Argh.

< dw >jerico_cacaw and < lj >jerico_cacaw (take the spaces out).

[msilverstar]

Huh, I had half an idea that the @ syntax would point at twitter names. It could get complicated.

Whatever you do, the rules would need extensive exercise before implementing, more than just comments to a suggestions post. Far better to work through the details in discussion than in production.

[mark]

Agreed.

I'm thinking it would be useful to start small, too. I.e., just make @foo refer to Dreamwidth accounts and leave it at that. No cross site, no OpenIDs, just a very quick shorthand to refer to local accounts.

Then as people start to use it and pick it up we can talk about how to make it expand for other things. Post in dw_news and ask people for comments and feedback, etc.

[goodbyebird]

The only suggestion I have is to maybe use another symbol than @(or the double-@@ that was suggested higher up, to minimize mix-ups).

[piscinarii]

What about:
@username.dw
@username.lj
@username.twitter (I don't know a shortened form of twitter)
@username.fb (Facebook link)
@username.site.com (or .net or .whatever for OpenID accounts)

And so on? There would have to be the .text attached to @username to make it turn into something, and if there is something attached before the @ then the whole email@someplace.com gets ignored?

I like the @username thing because it just isn't Twitter, Facebook uses it and it simplifies linking names. I really do think the way cross site names are linked here on Dreamwidth needs to be simplified.

Or, what about < username.dw > (minus the spaces) and so on? Or possibly <@username.dw> (I don't like this so much though, but it is still much simpler than now).

[zdashamber]

I had almost this thought, but for me it is more intuitive to use
@ljzdashamber or maybe with the dot @lj.zdashamber . That way all the code that creates the little head icon is in the same place, which is the place of the little head icon. It's still really short and much, much better to type, and it won't get confused with other uses of the @ symbol.

@ao3.zdashamber
@ij.zdashamber

This would be so awesome to have

[pauamma]

Hmm. I'm not really happy with that idea. Personally, for transparency, I would likely not want my @s to do anything special. This would mean a per-journal opt-out or opt-in, but that sounds like one of those options you and rahaeli are (rightly, IMO) against because of the code bloat and testing issues. So voting against, but that might change depending on your position about a per-journal "never parse/massage @" option.

[naraht]

In general I really do like the idea of this. I think we need some shorthand... having to type all the code to link to an LJ username is, in particular, incredibly cumbersome. I'll leave the specifics of the implementation to other commentators but I do love the idea of being able to type something as simple as @username.lj or @username.ao3.

[celtic_maenad]

I like this idea - most of my quibbles with it have already been mentioned: problems when typing email addresses, twitter-feeds importing to Dw...

I think if it's implemented site-wide but with a way to turn it off for each post, that'd be cool!

[torachan]

I would definitely love some sort of shorthand. I don't find the HTML difficult to type or remember, but it would be nice to be able to do it quicker, especially for offsite links.

[triadruid]

Against, for the simple reason that so much HTML/pseudoHTML is required in general posting, I don't find this onerous. And if HTML/pseudoHTML is that inaccessible, I'd much rather the site put its energy into redeeming the Rich Text Editor.

[dragonwolf]

This. Especially in regards to the RTE. Everyone's been complaining about needing to learn code and my thought has been "what about the rich text editor? I thought that could create the user name tag, too?"

[h4hahn]

I like it...if as stated @mark would be the equivalent of <*user name="mark"*>

I'm not partial to the twitter-esque @-sign alone.

[liv]

I'm afraid I really don't like this idea. The @ convention does something very specific on Twitter, and what you're proposing would just confuse people because it's sort of like Twitter but sort of not. It might be interesting to have a way to potentially notify someone when you mention them in a specific way, which is how the @ sign works on Twitter. Obviously there would have to be a carefully planned implementation with lots of options for this to work. So, if I said "I had tea with <user name="exampleuser"> yesterday" it would behave like a normal user tag, but if I said, "check out <@user name="xb95">'s suggestion about using Twitter-style @tags", you could choose to get a notification that I was talking about you, so you'd know where your traffic was coming from. But doing it as just a short way to write the user tag, no, I think that would be more confusing than helpful.

Also, I don't like the idea of introducing yet more DW-specific markup. It's bad enough that we have DW-specific pseudo-HTML, but that's a legacy behaviour, and it has been cleaned up enough to be a lot more usable than it was on LJ. Normal HTML has the advantage that it's universal; there are plenty of tutorials and automated tools for using it. Having to change your behaviour for each individual site you visit is just annoying (I don't think DW should use bbCode or Wiki markup either). I do also agree with other commenters that it's likely to introduce bugs when people type email addresses or code or indeed import their posts from Twitter itself.

[ree]

This. I had typed up my own response, but liv said the same things I did, only more clearly. Thanks.