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

[denise]

Mark did just program a "latest 100 tags" thing for the Latest Things page, which will be live with next codepush. I think that will be very awesome, and much like what you suggest.

[feathertail]

Not quite like #hashtags ... they'd give us an easy way to link to a tag. It'd definitely be fun, though. ^.^ I look forward to it. (Thanks, @mark! I mean, mark!)

[lap_otter]

Seeing "@mark" and "mark" together make it apparent how much @ looks like the swirly user icon thingummy--you know what I mean. Right?

I was already almost-for-sure going to vote in favor--but now I am for-sure going to.

[feathertail]

Hey, you're right! That wasn't apparent when I just typed it out.

(We should combine the @replies thing with the notify-people-when-they're-linked-to thing! With opt-outs, of course.)