HTML tags haven’t been working in comments for a while. Prompted by Andrew Reynolds, I checked and found the problem was a plugin, which I’ve disabled. So you can all go back to including hyperlinks, as well as bold and italic tags. Just part of the friendly service.
I’ve also switched the RSS feed to provide the entire article rather than just the summary. Some people wanted this, and it seems like the way of the future, but feel free to discuss.
John Quiggin 
For some reason I can’t seem to get RSS working (using firefox 1.5). Help?
Are you sure you can afford all those bold tags?
Firefox 1.5 for Mac loads the headlines fine using the “Live Bookmark” command. If you want a full-scale RSS feed it looks as if you need an add-on or separate aggregator. I’m still mostly using Safari myself, so others may be able to help further.
Hang the expense, Yobbo, I’ve got pixels to burn
Thanks very much. Now I can pace and vide to my heart’s content. A pompous libertarian – now there is a turn up for the books.
test
test
test
Cost of Mozilla Firefox: $0
Cost of Google Search: $0
Cost of being able to flame in 4 different styles again: priceless.
BOLD
ITALIC
UNDERLINE
Way cool!!!
How do you do the indented quote?
Thats odd. The Underline works in the preview but not in the actual post.
Terje,
You use the
tag
This bit is outside the
Basic user quide to tags. Use them as shown below except replace the round brackes with angle bracket {ie the greater than and less than symbol}.
(b) This is in bold (/b)
(i) This is in italics (/i)
(blockquote) this is a quote (/blockquote)
.
Once the brackets are replace it comes out as follows:-
This is in bold
This is in italics
w
o
o
And do not try the underline (u) tag – it does not work – even if it displays in the preview pane.
If you think you’ve got it tough, spare a thought for poor Archie of Archie and Mehitabel fame, back in typewriter days. He had to hit the keys by diving on them headfirst, and he could only do lower case apart from one time when someone left the shift key locked – and even then Mehitabel came along and pounced on it, releasing it.
It’s of course important—but note that important—for any pedant to be able to get their em dashes right.
Lets all hope, however, that this doesn’t work.
Crispin,
Looks like you should get a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
Ahh, the “a href” tag is back too. Excellent.
I’ll put it on my reading list, Andrew.
Unfortunately my recent experiences as a ‘mature-age’ university student have been that some of the tutors doing assessment marking have such poor knowledge of English that any improvement I might make in mine would doom me to more battles over grades. Using “its/it’s” appropriately seems to be considered advanced at Uni these days.
So I’ll make that my long-term reading list, perhaps.
I keep a copy at hand to lend to people who hand me reports etc. that are poorly punctuated. Fortunately, most of them realise that they have a problem. I imagine that would be difficult to do to a tutor at uni.
It does tend to reinforce your own inner pedant though – I now carry a pen to correct bad signs and I also notice where the sign’s meaning is incorrect or unclear.
A good example is on the Underground in London, where a sign reads “Penalty (pound sign)50 for any passenger who fails to show on demand a valid ticket for the entire journey.” Personally, I do not want to hold up my ticket for the entire journey if asked to – but I would be happy to show, on demand, a ticket, valid for my entire journey.
AR, you have just reminded me of Billy Connolly’s quip that he disobeyed a London Underground instruction that dogs should be carried on the escalators by not carrying a dog on the escalator. Oh, and he didn’t have a dog.
Testing arefs, try “When life gives you lemons…“.
Pardon for the last post. I was trying to insert a blockquote within a blockquote within another blockquote to get multiple levels of indentation. It looked fine in preview.
Yobbo Says: December 8th, 2005 at 5:40 pm
Margo Kingston’s spendthrift attitude to bolding was the ultimate cause of her downfall.
A link to Tim Blair on a civilised site?
Test only (hard to explain, unless it works):
The above test shows that is now possible to display the tags as they appear in your text editor :
<b>bold</b> : bold
<i>italic</i> : italic
<h1>Heading 1</h1> : Heading 1
… hmmm, “h1” tags not allowed.
<h2>Heading 2</h2> : Heading 2
<h3>Heading 3</h3> : Heading 3
<h4>Heading 4</h4> : Heading 4
<h5>Heading 5</h5> : Heading 5
<h6>Heading 6</h4> : Heading 6
… nope! Wrong again! No “h” tags allowed. Fooled again by the Preview area.
The RSS comments on Opera 8.5 still only show a few lines. For instance, this post came through as:
I don’t particularly mind except sometimes the summaries are so short as to be meaningless, and at other times (due to the cruelties of going over my Optus broadband limit) I’m limited to 28.8kbps,and would rather not wait to download a 150KB page for an article I’m not interested in, or is in fact quite short.
The grey stripe on the left of the block quotes is ugly. Anyone know why it’s there?
Andrew, the option change didn’t take effect for some reason. Fixed now, I hope.
James, I’m used to the stripe as Eudora uses the same convention. But it just happens, I don’t know why.
If I get free time over Christmans, I’ll look into the possibility of alternative themes for the site, and I’ll keep in mind requests for no-stripe quotes and similar. So, send them in!
John: The stripe is a CSS definition, it will be something like:
blockquote {
font-color: #FFFFFF;
border-left: 5px, gray;
}
If you get rid of the border-left part, you’ll get rid of the grey stripe.
Good. Once that’s fixed, we can move on to war and poverty.