ADDED - Line breaks (again) and navigation.

Akael

Akael

Forgive me, but I'm going to get the painfully blunt part of this out of my system first: What the heck are you guys thinking when it comes to this textile formatting thing? I was all excited about the idea behind OP when I first got started on here, but after working with it for a day, I'm ready to call it quits. Not only can we not use a simple language like HTML that almost everyone knows at least the basics of, but the system we are expected to use can't even do a simple single line break? Maybe you think it's not important to worry about the "look" of things right now and instead are focusing on behind-the-scenes mechanics, but seriously, take a look at the bottom of this page (scroll down to the very bottom and ignore the fluff at the top): http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/gta/wiki/campaign-web/chargen

It's not a matter of being "pretty," it's a matter of "my players refuse to read the Talents listing because it hurts their eyes." If there's some sort of useful "block of code" formatting option that would allow me to just paste everything in straight from notepad that I've just missed; then call me silly, let me know, and forget this little rant.

Less crippling but nearly as annoying is a lot of the navigation and interface. Why does my Edit Character have a drop down "PC in Campaign X" box, but not a "NPC in Campaign X" box? Why does clicking "Edit" on the NPC Tracker page take me to a screen with a single option? Why not just put that checkbox on the info creen for that character? Is there any reason to require us to click through an extra page before we can start editing info about a character? I have this issue with more than just character management, but I'm sure you get the idea.

Something else I'd like to see would be "spoiler" info boxes. I'd like to be able to make info about some of my characters/items/whatever available to people who want to borrow em for a campaign, but I don't want my players to know all the backstory to some of the NPCs yet. A "Click here if you're not a player in this campaign to view spoilers" button would rock my socks. I know the people I play with are trustworthy enough not to spoil their own story, and I'd like to make characters available to the public *before* the campaign is over.

Jason

_If there’s some sort of useful “block of code” formatting option that would allow me to just paste everything in straight from notepad that I’ve just missed; then call me silly, let me know, and forget this little rant._

You're looking
for
the tag

Akael

I think I must be missing something, because all I've managed to get using that tag is... tags mixed in with the still format-less text. :/

Jason

Granted, any PRE tag is fraught with danger, but yes, PRE is going to strip out any other formatting going on. I've been exasperated by the lack of line breaks, too, but I've found that in the most part, lists will generally work even better. From a semantic web point of view, I can see it, too; I've heard that the next iteration of web standards will make the BR tag obsolete for precisely that reason. So, think about it - if you're using a line break, maybe there's a good reason you shouldn't be.

Akael

My point wasn't even that it was overriding my other formatting - my point was that on the wiki page, it was doing *nothing*. Frankly though, after spending most of a second evening toying with the site now, I think I'm going to stick to using the usual email/livejournal/files-on-my-harddrive conglomeration. OP is a neat idea in theory, but for my particular group, the benefits don't seem to outweigh the hassle. But thanks for your help. :)

photoneater

bq. My point wasn’t even that it was overriding my other formatting – my point was that on the wiki page, it was doing nothing. Frankly though, after spending most of a second evening toying with the site now, I think I’m going to stick to using the usual email/livejournal/files-on-my-harddrive conglomeration. OP is a neat idea in theory, but for my particular group, the benefits don’t seem to outweigh the hassle. But thanks for your help. :)

Obviously, that's your choice, but just something to keep in mind- this IS just the beta. There are plenty of issues that have yet to be worked out.

Also, just as a sidenote, I came to this site never having even heard of textile. I didn't really find it all that difficult to pick up. Also, and I could be wrong here, but isn't textile the language commonly used on wiki sites?

Jason

_Also, and I could be wrong here, but isn’t textile the language commonly used on wiki sites?_

Nope. I'd say the most common is probably the one used by MediaWiki.

photoneater

bq. Nope. I’d say the most common is probably the one used by MediaWiki.

Okay, thanks for clarifying. Again, I'm not really knowledgeable on the subject.

Micah

Note: Some technical jargon follows, but it's necessary to explain some of the choices we've made.

In the interest of being blunt, here goes: we chose Textile because there was a pre-made parser that we could use to translate plain text into HTML. That means we could re-use someone else's code rather than writing a parser from scratch, which is no easy task, believe me. Rather than writing a wiki parser, I wanted to be writing blogging tools and NPC tracker tools, so that's where we are now. I looked into the MediaWiki syntax but couldn't find a parser.

I disabled HTML initially because I wanted the site to be secure against cross-site scripting attacks and other HTML monkey-business. I'm not 100% up to date on all the tricks people can pull, so I decided to play it safe and disallow all HTML.

Since then, several people have voiced their ire over this. I myself find it constraining as well, and want to relax the rules. I think I may have found a way to allow some HTML and disallow others. I plan to put this into place very soon in order to allow things like line breaks and such, while disallowing script tags.

I appreciate people's frustration with things, but we can only do so much, and it will never be perfect. Read through this forum and you'll see there are several excellent suggestions on how to make the site better. I can't do them all, and I definitely can't do them all immediately. Instead, I try to hit as many as I can as fast as I can. That means that some things will be frustrating and clunky and will stay that way for a long time.

Jason

Is it PHP back there? If so, take a look at the striptags function. That would allow you to specify what HTML tags are OK, rather than what's not. That makes things pretty safe for your cross-site scripting attacks, especially if you're limiting it to your B's and BR's and P's and even your BLOCKQUOTE's.

geekevolved

I think he's using mostly ruby.

Micah

Ruby on Rails with a smattering of whatever else is needed to keep things running :)

I just committed an update that will allow a handful of HTML tags (br, pre, blockquote, and some others) in all the Textile fields (blog posts, character info, etc). We'll do a little more testing on it, then push it to production tomorrow night. At that point, we'll need to re-render the wiki pages, but that can run in the background and it will only affect you if you happen to be editing a page at the exact instant it's re-rendered by the background process. That's about a 1 in a million shot.

Thanks for the requests and keep them coming.

Jason

Ruby I know nothing about, so I can't really help you there.

But ... Hurray! Very glad to know we'll have those basic HTML tags soon.

Micah

We've added the ability to format your posts with a "select few HTML tags":http://www.obsidianportal.com/tutorials/allowed-html-tags. Let me know if there's something missing from that list that should be there.

In order to see the changes, just edit and re-save any post, character, item, or anywhere else that uses a Textile field. When it's re-saved, the new formatting will take place.

Akael

Thank you! I know it may not seem like a big deal to people who are *only* using the site for story information (or people already used to textile), but for those of us who want to include house rules, statistics, and such-like (and who never seem to have enough hours in the day), this is wonderful.