John, that would be a really neat thing.

t cough

Someone-- ita?-- mentioned the Neat Thing that you can request a full view of the entire contents of the thread (s/he also talked about a feature where you could ask to see posts 40-150, which would be even cooler, but I think that one was still in hypotheticality?) -- is that a feature right now? I thought they said it was, but I can't find the button on the page

That was all hypothetical, but there is already a facility to dump the contents of threads to flat HTML.

It's not something every user can do, presumably because if a hundred people clicked on "Save This Entire Thread To One File" out of curiosity, that wouldn't be very good for the server or the amount of total bandwidth. ita certainly dumped threads from the pre-launch version of this board, I remember seeing one of them.

OK, thinking about this in the shower, should a long-URL-truncation function work like this:

http://something/which/is/too/long/to/display.htm

turns into

http://something/which/[...]

kind of a Windows version, should it turn into

http://something/[...]/display.htm

kind of a Mac version -- gives more of a hint about contents if you can see the end of it, like if the document's called "porn.html" -- or should it just do this:

[URL too long for display]

which is kind of abrupt, but it does encourage people to think before they post really really long ones.

In WX and TT, you could avoid the problem by putting brackets around the URL, as in t Overly long URL , and the software would automatically break it so that it fit the proper size of the window. Wouldn't that work here as well? Or does it specifically need to be coded?

does it specifically need to be coded?

Yes it does, unless there's something I'm missing, but, that reminds me, there was of course the other possibility -- of just having it break:

http://something/which/is/
too/long/to/display.htm

which leaves it onscreen so that someone could for instance copy it, but I don't know if copyability matters very much to people. You can always copy it by right-clicking or whatever.

Yes it does

Okay. So in that case what we're doing is discussing how we would want OUR code to work. Got it.

I'm assuming that the reason those things stretch out the browser windows is that the text-wrapping code in browsers doesn't know how to wrap a really long "word" where "word" is defined as a sequence of characters which doesn't contain any spaces or hyphens.

Some people's browsers may be able to, I guess, but not mine.

Anyway I've written a little function for ita to play with along the lines of:

function tweakURL(){
if(damn thing too long)
chop off everything after the third slash and make that the link text
}else{
leave it alone
}

which I'll email rather than paste here what with disappearing-slash issues and all.

It's so sad when the slash disappears.

I've just noticed, when trying to make an HTML list come out as

A)
B)
C)

that I can't, because Jon B's set an override for all List Items in the style sheet to

list-style-type: disc

(see end of second line) -- this is almost certainly a bug, in the sense of unintended feature, because it means that we can't have numbered lists or whatever.

I vote for that getting removed! Just the bit quoted above would do it.