So, first off, thanks for the disable-pseudo-WYSIWYG option! (Now we just need Markdown in profiles working again. :) )
As for this:
I am not a huge fan of permanently displaying formatting options at the top, because I do think it takes up a lot of unnecessary real estate and makes formatting comments feel a lot more intimidating than it has to. (Though it’s definitely a much harder UI challenge to then still allow people to format things the way they want).
[Actually, before I address that, a bug! When I copied and pasted the above quote into the comment box here, the width of the comment box suddenly shrunk by a substantial amount, and has remained shrunken as I continue to type this. No idea why.]
Anyway, yeah, I’d say that letting people format their comments without it being a huge pain is substantially more important than avoiding it looking intimidating. I mean, if it were scaring people away from commenting entirely that would be one thing, but otherwise I’m not seeinng the problem. Also like… most people have used a WYSIWYG word processor at some point so I’m confused as to what’s so intimidating here? When things are not explicitly displayed it’s just confusing.
(That said, now that I’ve set mine to just use Markdown without all that, I guess I no longer have much of an interest in the result, so I don’t think I’m going to keep arguing about this. :) )
(Replying here to comment in other thread.)
So, first off, thanks for the disable-pseudo-WYSIWYG option! (Now we just need Markdown in profiles working again. :) )
As for this:
[Actually, before I address that, a bug! When I copied and pasted the above quote into the comment box here, the width of the comment box suddenly shrunk by a substantial amount, and has remained shrunken as I continue to type this. No idea why.]
Anyway, yeah, I’d say that letting people format their comments without it being a huge pain is substantially more important than avoiding it looking intimidating. I mean, if it were scaring people away from commenting entirely that would be one thing, but otherwise I’m not seeinng the problem. Also like… most people have used a WYSIWYG word processor at some point so I’m confused as to what’s so intimidating here? When things are not explicitly displayed it’s just confusing.
(That said, now that I’ve set mine to just use Markdown without all that, I guess I no longer have much of an interest in the result, so I don’t think I’m going to keep arguing about this. :) )
Personally I prefer having no visible buttons, it makes the interface cleaner and more elegant.
Maybe make this an option as well?