clarification about FrontPage's message posting behavior

From: mda
Keywords: IXForum, FrontPage, Suggestion
Remote Name: 24.147.234.5
Remote User:
Date: 09/15/00
Time: 15:24

Comments

Further experimentation has led me to some clarification about FrontPage's message posting behavior, so I've updated the notes about this in the Posting help page, under the section about the Comments field, at URL: http://www.ideaxchg.com/ix/ixhlp006.htm#Comments

Previously, I had thought that copying and pasting into the Comments field could improve on preserving formatting, and even might pull in certain HTML tags and features that would otherwise not work when entered directly.  This seems to have been incorrect.  The only benefit to copying and pasting text instead of entering it directly is that a text editor may be more convenient (and safer) for preparing long messages, but it won't avoid the loss of some white space formatting elements, such as tabs, multiple consecutive spaces, or simple line breaks.  However, I did just discover a couple of useful things that do work, regardless of how the text is entered:

• 2 consecutive newlines will be treated as a paragraph break
  I.e. a blank like will be preserved in the generated posting page, although a single hard newline is just treated as a blank.  So if you want to break up your text into separate paragraphs, just insert a blank line between the pieces you want to split.
  
  
• text that looks like a URL will automatically become a live hyperlink
  This applies to things like http://www.ideaxchg.com or mailto:test@ideaxchg.com

So far I have not found any way to post raw HTML and get that to work, but I haven't yet experimented very thoroughly on this.  If you would like to test out this behavior yourself or look at the results of my own tests, the place to do such experiments is in the IdeaXchg Misc forum, at URL: http://www.ideaxchg.com/ix01/d1/_sys/tocthrdu.htm

If you make any significant discoveries, please feel free to post your findings here, in the primary IdeaXchg forum, at: http://www.ideaxchg.com/ix01/d2/_sys/tocthrdu.htm

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