I think Textile should replace BBcode (Page 1 of 2)

Beg your pardon?
There are exactly 9 (nine) different BBcode tags in the standard version.
Bulky?
Cumbersome?
Limited maybe, but no way difficult.

If you are looking for something really cumbersome then I think Textile is the option.

No, really, why trying to have a complete html replacement?
Would be easier to actually allow at least some HTML tags than having to learn a complete new markup language

Plus, I always have the feeling that too much layout options don't help the readability of a board.
Once you allow people to mess around with different font sizes and so on - some of them will almost certainly overdo it.

I think it would make punBB at least more complicated if not slower.

A while ago, I tried to leave a comment on the Spreadfirefox site. It uses CivicSpace and uses Textile for comment formatting.

I'm familiar with bbcode, html, etc. I spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out how to leave a url in a comment. I read the docs on the SF site, I read the docs at Textpatern, I Googled to no end and never found my answer.

Maybe it was a broken implementation on the SF site, I don't know, but I'm already familair with bbcode and it's used on every forum I frequent. phpBB, PunBB, IPB and vBulletin all use bbcode, no need to retrain the brain when posting.

I'm not putting Textile down, it might be really nice but I could never figure it out.

One of the problems with Textile is it is so simple people think there must be some other trick to it.

"Try PunBB":http://punbb.org

That's a URL.

If it didn't work SF must have not done it right.

So WIndows is worth any unix a hundred times ?

It's mostly old text-only (usenet-like) markup, with some more for the complex things :

*strong emphasis*
_emphasis_
??cite??
"text":http://url
bq. a quotation block

and so on. Once you get it, you won't find simpler or faster to use.

Linux is the best, but all people don't want to enter line codes : and it's normal. Same thing here. Textile is simply not at all explicit. And after, when these people learn html, the logic way of bbcode help them. Textile ... not intuitive, sorry.

The best thing for final user would be a WYSIWYG and not a textarea ... all in dhtml with directly the form. But dev would say "yes but it's not compatible with Mosaic".

That's the life

a dhtml area with only possibility to do links, bold, underline ... is perfect : or in my case, use the css of my nucleus to have the same layout between nucleus and punBB for example ...

there are 2 webmasters :
- who using dhtml to have stars around its mouse all over the screen
- who using dhtml for a better and intuitive navigation

Wouldn't it be an option to make a Textile mod?
So that people can chose wether they want to offer bbcode or textile?
This is going to become someting like Windows vs. linux otherwise.

Personally I don't see anything wrong with plain text. Apart from quote and code tags who needs anything else.

One major drawback of something like textile or similar is that they only work on forums where there are regular visitors who are willing to take the time to learn. On support forums and such like where visitors are just passing through then anything other than basic bbcode (which they might already have some familiarity with) is pointless.

BBcode is actually difficult for the final user.

Now, if you said that final user is somewhat accustomed to it, then fine, I could agree, but that's entirely different from being "simple" (as in easy to use). Just the fact that user has to type "[]" is a pain in the ass. Just the fact that user has to remember to close tags with "/" is a pain in the ass. Posting URLs is difficult [url=http://omfg as well as posting images and creating lists.

Also, forget about advanced text styling via CSS, advanced text alignement, the ability to apply classes and ids to elements (all of which are available in Textile), and the fact that BBcode still outputs meaningless tags, such as <i> and <b> .

And then you miss all the advanced characters conversion, meaning that if user type "apple", with Textile quotes are converted into the actual HTML entities. Same for ellipsis, apostrophes, en dashes and em dashes, not to mention special charatcters such as à è ì ù ò and so on. And no, you don't have to learn tags for all of these, Textile does it for you in a transparent way. So, your posts are nicer and easier to read.

The selling point of BBcose is that's quite popular (for no apparent reason). But it is no better that any other parser. But if you're objective, you can even say that BBcode is actually the worst, most unuseable, difficult of the basket.

Maybe doing italics and bold emphasis with BBCode takes too long for people to bother?

I vote for a Textile and/or Markdown and BBCode option.

THEY CAN ALLWAYS LEAVE THE CAPS LOCK ON ... to be completely ignored .