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

[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.

[gchick]

(tell me I'm not the only one who went to check if "array" was an actual user)

Oh, and agreed.

[sophie]

Well, in those cases you'd want to use <raw></raw> - which is a good idea anyway if you're pasting code.

[dragonwolf]

Um... <raw> isn't a real HTML tag. Therefore, if it's implemented anywhere (and yes, DW does have the <raw-code> tag), it's custom and site-specific. This not only makes it a pain for those of us who use HTML tags to format things (yet another site-specific tag to remember), especially for cases where @ is used that isn't in code (such as emails, as others have mentioned), but also makes it yet another thing that may or may not translate in cross-posts.

[sophie]

I am aware that neither <raw> nor <raw-code> is an HTML tag. I'm terribly sorry that I got the name wrong.

But please bear in mind that the people who wrote our crossposter know what they're doing. <raw-code>, as well as the other LJ-specific tags that we've renamed, are correctly done via crossposting. If they weren't, that would be a bug and one that could then be filed and fixed.

And as I've pointed out, it's quite easy to make sure emails don't get caught in the crossfire.