Dreamwidth Suggestions

Description:
When selecting the text to quote, it's often difficult or impossible to tell for sure whether you have any extraneous whitespace selected. For instance, I often find I have an extra space character selected at the end of the sentence that I didn't want to select. Even worse is when you accidentally select a leading or trailing line break meaning that you get a <blockquote> style quote rather than a <q> style quote.

What I'm proposing is that the selected text should be stripped of leading and trailing whitespace (spaces, newlines and tabs) before it is quoted and before the code determines whether it should be using <q> or <blockquote>.

The only drawback I can think of for this is if people actively want to quote trailing spaces or leading line breaks but I honestly can't think of any reason anyone would actually want to do this. Whcih probably means there are thousands of people out there about to tell me how wrong I am.

Description:
I'm fairly sure that the little emoticons that can optionally be attached to comments haven't been updated at all since I joined LJ back in 2001, and it sure does show.

They're already fairly well hidden. They're not available through quick reply at all, and through the regular comment interface, the only indication that they exist at all is a tiny greyed out smiley.

Personally, I'd like to see them just removed entirely. They look ugly, add a bit of extra clutter to the interface and the code, and don't really serve much of a useful purpose. What I presume was their intended purpose has now been largely superseded by people having and using a wide variety of user icons.

If we want to keep them, though, we should at least completely replace them all with newer graphics.

Description:
Auto-formatting is massively useful most of the time, since it lets people write in paragraphs without having to worry about adding in HTML line breaks.

Often, though, if people are putting lists or tables into their entry -- either coded manually or copied from elsewhere -- they won't disable auto-formatting either because they forget or because they don't know how. This often results in extra line breaks where they aren't wanted, resulting in ugly and ungainly entries or comments.

It would be nice if auto-formatting could automatically be turned off in tags such as <ul>, <ol>, <dl>, <table>, and <pre> to stop this from happening.

The disadvantage to this is that if people are writing lists/tables and actually want additional linebreaks, they'll have to insert them manually. I think this is much rarer than people not wanting the linebreaks there, though, and also think that it's a problem that's more likely to be encountered by people who are more familiar with HTML in the first place.