Aliases for user tags

[cesy]

Title:
Aliases for user tags

Area:
site markup, entries, comments

Summary:
Add extra aliases to the "user" and "lj user" tags.

Description:
You can currently use <user name=exampleusername site=livejournal.com> or <lj user=exampleusername site=livejournal.com> to refer to someone on LJ. I'd propose adding aliases so that "livejournal" and "lj" will also work instead of "livejournal.com". (i.e. <user name=exampleusername site=lj> would have the same effect as <user name=exampleusername site=livejournal.com>.)

I would also suggest adding insanejournal and ij as aliases for insanejournal.com. Other aliases could possibly be added later, though we would have to be careful to keep them unambiguous. (And, of course, all the aliases would then need documenting in a FAQ.)

Poll #1153 Aliases for user tags

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 42

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This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
15 (35.7%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
2 (4.8%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
19 (45.2%)

(I have no opinion)
6 (14.3%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[zvi]

Synonyms mean more chances to screw things up.

[vampwillow]

The language/service interlinks on Wikipedia et all have an allocation table and that works fine so I see no reason why some similar abbreviation *options* shouldn't work as well here, so long as the full version continues to be available.

Naturally, the presence of an abbreviation doesn't endorse a particular service, etc ...

[pauamma]

I'm unsure about using lj as an alias for LiveJournal. (An acquaintance of mine mentions LJ and Fedora a lot in her blog entries, and it took me a while to figure out she didn't mean LiveJournal or the Unix distribution. When I mentioned it, ISTR she didn't expect anyone to parse them as I did.)

[cheyinka]

I would rather <user name=whoever site=wherever.com> keep the current format; if a dozen DW clones spring up no one has to wonder whether or not they've been added, remember which sites they can use an alias for and which they can't, remember on the clones which sites have the alias and which don't, or get used to just typing 'livejournal' or 'insanejournal' and forget that that's just an alias for the standard way of doing it.

As it is, as long as no one on DW cares that the little-person-icons are correct for a given site, no one but the poster even needs to know that a given LJ or DW clone exists.

[aedifica]

I came back to add a comment that I would be all for being able to just type "lj" instead of "livejournal.com" every time I want to link someone's LJ. Enough of my friends are still on LJ that typing the whole thing each time really adds up.

If it's an easy thing to add, I'd say please do add it and people who don't want it can just not use it.

[sky]

This would be a lot less work than typing out the whole thing every time.

(And tangentially, while we're talking about things we'd like to see in the <user> tag, I really miss the title attribute from Livejournal :( )

[zvi]

I am not an owner, but my understanding is that they'll never support the title attribute because it causes identity confusion. You can always link to someone with a regular <a> tag if you want to refer to them by something other than their account name.

[sky]

Hm, it tends to work the opposite way for me -- it helps establish identity because I can use it to quickly link regular names with LJ screennames. More than anything, though, it mostly just drives me crazy that all my entries imported from LJ using the title attribute don't work correctly on DW. :(