[TAG] Points of style

[Heather Stern]

A quick note on good versus bad URL formation in Answer Gang missives.
I like to encourage folks to go heavy on the URLs.  My scripts
automagically format correct URLs as hotlinks (one of the first and
finest features I ever put in) but it gets indigestion on a few, and
frankly it's annoying to code around.

{well, ok, not so quick, and not solely about URLs. heh.}

Good formats:
	http//www.whatsit.com/foo.cgi?foo=bar&whiz=bang

    ... this can either be after introduction by a paragraph ending in : or
    as the second line in only two lines of text together, and it'll be
    nicely indented.  If inline, it'll just be made hotlinked.

	(http://www.sidecomment.org/)

    Marks up very nicely thanks!

	[[something to hotlink][http://www.mywhackyURL.com]]

    Actually I can understand that's a little ugly, but it's something I
    whipped up so I can add hotlinks on words on the fly.  Use it if you
    feel like.  


Ok formats:
    lgazmail might support these directly soon, but they're readable at 
    least and that makes them easy to look for with eyeballs...

	www.whizbang.net

	[something to hotlink   http://www.linkwardho.net/]

    wiki like :)  Jim warned me, when wikis were on the rise, that
    eventually we'd resemble a wiki in mailing-list form.  He's right,
    you know...

Try to avoid please??
	<http://www.sidecomment.net>

    I had some early problems with entities, so < and > are sgml-ified very
    early.  I can in theory change where the entities are applied, but that 
    also mucks with my checker against doublemarkup.  whoops.  if you just
    *have* to seperate it off, please use parentheses... that's what I keep
    changing them to in the bait, err, mboxes during processing.

While I'm at mentioning these little tidbits, here's a few more

* Top posting bad. (well ok, annoying and resolvable, but more work for
  me and Thomas.) Inline posting good.  

* It's perfectly ok to trim out the 
  >> On date so and so The Eminent $speaker said:
  ...and just leave in what they said.  We collect the threads and these
  things stack up.  We always have to trim these out of the final
  results anyway because TAG columns just don't look like that :) 

  Thank goodness Thomas' ruby scripts handle most of the mess in sorting
  out who really said what.  

* most of you have the grace to snip off extra sig blocks but your own. 
  Thank you thank you thank you!

* If there's a nickname you favor by your Answerbubble, add a header to
  your outbound TAG mail, in this format:

	X-gazette-tag: Sluggo

  Otherwise we make it up as we go. I'm sure you can get help from the
  rest of the Gang :) if you need help to tweak your outbound mail.

* We need more 2c tips :D  They don't just have to be in response to the 
  simplere questions.

Thanks.

-* Heather Stern * star at starshine.org * The Answer Gang's Editor Gal *-
   The Linux Gazette (http://www.linuxgazette.net/) is under the LDP