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

[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.

[ringthebells]

+1

[trobadora]

+1

[sorchasilver]

+1