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

[mark]

Good point - and I agree. I'll keep this in mind when we actually talk about what to support or not.

It looks like there was some positive feedback on my suggestion of just making it Dreamwidth only for now and seeing how people use it and whether or not we should make it cross-site. I'd love to make it work with f.ex Twitter, LJ, Facebook, AO3, etc but that's going to take some discussion to find ways that are intuitive and not more confusing than just using a URL.

[matgb]

YEah, I just got down to that comment, and I pretty much agree with it. Start with just DW, then expand cautiously, but Twitter and FB probably ought to be involved early in any expansion simply because it's from those sites that we probably should look to for mid-term growth, I suspect we'll always get a trickle of new LJ users but I'd rather actively promote the platform to new bloggers as well (I'm still thinking of running my own install at some point down the line for the UK, and Twitter would be my main source of new sign ups).

But starting with just DW as an option works well.

[zvi]

The problem with supporting it for Dreamwidth native accounts and not OpenID accounts is that it creates another way in which OpenID accounts are not like real accounts; the distinctions between them really annoy some people who are trying to convince people that visiting here is a viable option for staying in touch.